All My X’s Live in Texas: ModelOps Recommended Sessions at SAS Innovate
SAS Innovate is just around the corner, taking place April 27th through April 30th in Grapevine, Texas. With speakers like Mel Robbins, entertainment from Dude Perfect, group pricing discounts, and even FREE virtual passes, this is an event you don’t want to miss! But in between all the fun, there are plenty of opportunities to learn. For my AI Engineers, here is my list of our ModelOps approved sessions and experiences.
Experiences
Visit the ModelOps Booth
The Innovation Hub at SAS Innovate will be open at several points during the conference, giving you plenty of time to chat with experts across SAS. That being said, there are a few opportunities to grab free snacks and drinks in the Innovation Hub. Your first opportunity is during the welcome reception, which will take place Monday, April 27th at 5:30 PM CT. There is also a Happy Hour the following day at 6:00 PM CT.
While drinks and snacks are a big draw, I’ll be there with several other ModelOps experts. We’ve put together some interactive demos and can talk shop about what new features you can expect soon in SAS Model Manager and SAS Container Runtime. If you aren’t excited about any of that, you are also welcome to challenge me to a pun-off (by request only – can’t punish the other attendees).
Get Hands-On with SAS Model Manager at the Try Zone
I’ve praised our model card as one of the easiest to generate and with some of the best visuals on the market. And I am willing to put my money where my mouth is. Visit the Try Zone to generate a model card of your own, as well as try many of the key capabilities in SAS Model Manager. If you don’t like it, well, you can always share your feedback with the Product Manager for SAS Model Manager 😉
Tuesday, April 28th
Accelerating Intelligent Decisioning Development with Python, Containers and Automation
On Tuesday, April 28th at 1:00 PM CT, hear from Magnus Mogstad, an Engineering Manager with DNB, on how to transform the development lifecycle using containerization, Git, and automated pipelines deployed to containerized environments. Attendees will learn how local environments using Python, containers, and database management tools can closely replicate production—enabling rapid testing, consistent data handling, and fewer deployment issues. The session shows how this approach supports faster iteration, stronger version control, and reduced downtime, helping teams deliver SAS solutions with greater speed and confidence in today’s fast-paced environment.
Build on a solid foundation. Don't let your AI strategy collapse before it starts.
Join Manisha Khanna and Sterlina Smith at 3:00 PM CT on Tuesday to learn about the TM Forum AI Native Blueprint. This framework guides strategy, aligns technology, and builds trust by applying AI thoughtfully across people, processes, and platforms. TM Forum is partnering with SAS and others to create a telecom industry-specific AI Blueprint for practical, ROI-driven implementation. Join this session to see how this framework can be operationalized through a real-world example--scaling AI with purpose and impact.
From Vibes to Value: Decisioning with SAS Viya on Vibration Data
Andrew Brody, a Senior Reliability Engineer at AES, will lead a session at 4:00 PM CT on Tuesday where attendees will learn an end-to-end pattern that reduces nuisance alarms, accelerates detection, and scales decisions across fleets—closing the loop from monitoring to maintenance. This session shows how SAS Viya turns wind turbines stream vibration data into decisions you can trust—using Visual Analytics to surface failure signatures and engineer candidate features, promoting them into Model Studio to train, compare, and govern pipelines, and then operationalizing the winning score in Intelligent Decisioning to route work, adapt thresholds by operating state, and capture outcomes.
Wednesday, April 29th
AI-Driven Customer Churn Prediction and Prevention with SAS
Bright and early Wednesday morning at 8:30 AM CT, David Wiehle will lead a session where AI is injected into an existing process designed to predict customer churn for a retail company. A combination of AI prompts and large language models (LLMs) is used in SAS Intelligent Decisioning to identify customers with the highest churn probability and generate personalized offers to encourage retention. Attendees to this session will gain insights into how to leverage AI and real-time data to make forward-thinking decisions.
Registering & Executing LLMs in SAS Model Manager
Alex Malich will walk through the new and emerging capabilities in SAS Model Manager for LLMOps and Agentic AI later that morning at 10:15 AM CT. This demo will walk through registering an LLM deployed in Azure Open AI into the unified model repository and creating a model card. We will also look at testing and other scoring mechanisms to execute the LLM, new model cards, and upcoming features for Agentic AI.
Inbox to Insight: LLM‑Powered Email Triage on SAS Viya
How does SAS’s technical support team handle a relentless stream of emails? Using a transformer-based text analytics pipeline on SAS Viya that automates classification with minimal data preparation, all while preserving privacy. Join Ann Kuo at 11:25 AM CT on Wednesday morning to walk through the end-to-end modeling workflow, including training, evaluation, and deployment of BERT-based models that achieved ~3% misclassification on hold-out data and uncovered labeling inconsistencies in human-tagged content.
When ‘Sounds Right’ Isn’t ‘Is Right’: Evaluating LLMs in Production
Mary Osborne will explore why traditional metrics like BLEU or ROUGE fail to capture real-world performance. In this session at 2:45PM CT, attendees will learn how SAS is designing evaluation frameworks that measure not just accuracy, but faithfulness, consistency, safety, and domain relevance—and how they can operationalize those metrics within production workflows.
Grab the Bool by the Horns
In between all the learning opportunities, don’t forget to check out the opening session at 8:30 AM CT on Tuesday to hear all about the things SAS is working on (spoiler: it is a lot). Dude Perfect will make their appearance later that day at 5:00 PM CT. On Wednesday, you can catch Mel Robbins at 12:00 PM CT and don’t forget to end the day-ta at Circle R Ranch at 7:00 PM for a taste of Texas.
What other great sessions did I miss? Let me know in the comments!
Otherwise, you can catch me at the ModelOps booth or one of these exciting sessions!
