ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this episode of AWS Partners Unplugged, host Sri Raghavan talks with John Carey, SVP of Global Channels at SAS, recorded in Cary, North Carolina. They explore how the long-running SAS–AWS partnership helps enterprises run data and AI workloads with predictability, transparency, and trust. John frames the relationship as moving IT cost toward a "deterministic" model — the same auditable answer every time — while still enabling non-deterministic, generative workloads. The conversation covers SAS Cloud managed offerings on AWS, draw downs against AWS commit contracts via Marketplace, and SAS's early-to-market support for sovereign cloud and GDPR. John digs into SAS's role in the agentic AI era: Copilot inside SAS Viya, MCP server integration that lets customers bring their own agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot), and why "trusted AI" with human-in-the-loop and a "translucent box" of auditable decisioning matters in regulated industries. They also discuss customer use cases across financial services (risk, fraud, compliance) and MarTech (Customer Intelligence 360 for fan engagement with Liverpool FC, LAFC, and Octagon), the value of the Strategic Collaboration Agreement, SAS's leadership in Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant for Decision Intelligence Platforms, and a greenfield opportunity to bring OT + IT data together in manufacturing (warehouse safety via synthetic vision). It closes with a lighthearted desert-island-classics round.
