SAS Visual Investigator Copilot – Prompt-based Text Generation

SAS Viya Copilot is a set of SaaS features that utilize LLMs to transform natural language into recommendations and actions, providing users with a more intuitive and accessible way to work within their SAS Viya ecosystem. This post is part three of a series exploring SAS Viya Copilot for Visual Investigator, with a deep dive into its text generation features.

SAS Viya Copilot for Visual Investigator

For a more in-depth introduction to SAS Viya Copilot, please see my previous posts: SAS Visual Investigator Copilot – Assisted Search and SAS Visual Investigator Copilot – Image Description Generation.

In short, SAS Viya Copilot can be used to enhance your SAS Visual Investigator usage in several ways, including:

Using the Copilot pane to learn how to perform a task in SAS Visual Investigator
Using the Copilot pane to learn more about your organization’s unique SAS Visual Investigator implementation

Please note the current limitations of the Copilot pane, including:

Copilot is unable to directly modify your SAS Visual Investigator configuration
Copilot is unable to display sensitive or restricted information
Copilot cannot provide you with an export of your system configuration

In addition to the abovementioned usages of the Copilot pane, SAS Viya Copilot offers three in-context experiences that have been directly embedded within SAS Visual Investigator:

Assisted search: Use natural, conversational language to search within SAS Visual Investigator
Image description generation: Use GenAI to create descriptions for images that appear on a page
Prompt-based text generation: Use GenAI to create text based on a preconfigured prompt

In the first two parts of this series, I explored the assisted search and image description generation features. In this post, let’s dive into the prompt-based text generation feature.

Feature Enablement

Depending on your software version, the abovementioned features may first need to be toggled on within SAS Environment Manager. Note that this is only relevant for software releases older than 2026.04, as the features become generally available in the 2026.04 release.

The relevant features are:

GenAI Assisted Search
GenAI Image Description
GenAI Text Generation
GenAI Conversational Agent

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The feature pertaining to the prompt-based text generation capability is GenAI Text Generation.

GenAI Text Generation

In this post, I will walk you through how to use the GenAI text generation feature to summarize all the comments associated with a particular object in SAS Visual Investigator.

Configuration

In order to use the GenAI text generation feature, you must first create a prompt template to define how you want to structure and show the generated text.

Start by following the typical steps to create a new Document Template. Document templates can be created from SAS Visual Investigator’s Admin UI (Manage Investigate and Search), under Pages – Document Templates – New document template.

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Next, create a new block to be added to the document template. With the objective of summarizing object comments in mind, I’m using the Comments block type.

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Go to the Layout tab of the block and insert the GenAI prompt component.

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In the GenAI prompt window, enter a prompt—specific instructions for the AI to process the available data associated with the object. This is mandatory. In this example, I’m using the prompt “Summarize the information”.

Optionally, you can enter a scope name, which gives this section a name and allow for better organization. If a scope name is provided, the prompt targets only data within that scope. Otherwise, the prompt will target data across the entire template.

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This is what the Layout tab looks like after adding GenAI prompt. Notice that I’ve moved the repeating content block into the Scope I’ve created.

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Once the block has been saved, add it to the new Prompt Template.

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Now that the prompt template has been configured, I can configure the Entity Page Template to include the Generated Text control. This new control can be dragged and dropped onto the canvas like other page controls. Once it has been added to the canvas, click on it to configure it. Set the Prompt template as the prompt template we previously created. Optionally, you can define a title text. If the Automatically generate box is checked, the comment summary will be generated automatically. If left unchecked, the end user will have the option to click on a Generate button to generate the summary.

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Now that the configuration has been completed, let’s take a look at the result in the Investigator UI (Investigate and Search Data).

I’ve created a new Case object and added a number of comments.

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You can now click on the Generate button within the newly added Comment Summary control to generate a summary of all the comments associated with this object.

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This is just one of many use cases for this GenAI feature.

Summary

In this post, I showcased the GenAI text generation feature within SAS Visual Investigator, including its configuration.