SAS made a number of announcements during SAS Innovate 2025 in Orlando, Florida, including new capabilities in areas such as agentic AI, quantum AI, and digital twins. However, one topic that drew considerable interest during the weeklong conference remained largely under wraps: SAS’s plans to go public.
Speaking to journalists, Gavin Day, the company’s newly appointed Chief Operating Officer, discussed SAS’s preparation for a potential initial public offering (IPO), his expanded role, and how AI technologies (including quantum) are influencing the company’s direction.
Marching orders
Day joined SAS in 2011 as Vice President of Data Management and has since held several leadership roles, including Executive Vice President at the Office of the CEO. He now holds that title concurrently with his remit as COO.
“We spent the last four or five years getting our SAS Viya product into the cloud and moving our technology into a software-as-a-service model. Now the focus is internal — making sure we’re operating with discipline and consistency. That means asking how we’re impacting our customers, and whether we’re actually delivering value to them,” he said.
According to Day, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight has instructed the company to modernise and prepare to operate as a public company.
“A big part of my role is making sure SAS looks and operates like our publicly traded peers. That includes reporting earnings on time and following GAAP standards. It’s really about modernising how we run things internally,” Day explained.
IPO timeline
Asked whether the company has set a date for its IPO, Day said several factors are shaping the decision.
“We’re definitely watching market conditions and the overall volatility. I’ve spoken with people who believe the global economy will stabilise soon, and others who think uncertainty will persist for a while,” he said.
He added that since more than half of SAS’s revenue comes from outside the United States, the company is especially attuned to developments in international markets.
“We’ve had to stay aligned with the governments we work with globally, and we’ll continue to do that. Our focus is on making sure we’re delivering what’s needed and staying relevant to our customers,” Day remarked.
When pressed for a timeline, Day said there was no update. “That’s Dr Goodnight’s decision,” he said.
For his part, Day said his responsibility is to ensure SAS is operationally ready for a potential listing.
“If I can get us to a point where we’re ready to report and operate as a public company, then Dr Goodnight has options. From there, it’s about watching how the economic landscape evolves and letting him decide when the time is right,” he said.
AI advantage
While SAS has introduced agentic AI capabilities across its platforms, Day said the company is trying to steer clear of the current hype cycle.
“The enterprise space is still in what I’d call a summer of disappointment when it comes to AI. Organisations have made investments, but they’re not seeing the value they expected,” he observed.
He added that SAS is not focused on selling customers generic AI toolkits to build their own models.
“We’re embedding AI and machine learning into everything we do. That means it works behind the scenes to improve data quality, data integration, and some of the more manual tasks. It also supports content generation and helps make our analytics and decision-making more explainable,” Day said.
On the topic of quantum AI, companies like P&G have demonstrated how they are working with SAS to solve complex business problems. Day foresees quantum AI eventually being a standard part of SAS’s offering.
“As the hardware matures, the time it takes to generate insights is going to drop significantly. That’s where quantum techniques can really help. We’ll see a shift similar to what we saw with AI, but we need to make sure both vendors and customers are investing in the right areas early, with clearly defined use cases. AI was often a technology looking for a problem, and we want to avoid repeating that with quantum,” he said.
Day pointed to manufacturing, supply chain, and consumer goods as sectors where quantum technology could have a significant impact.
“These are industries with large, complex logistics and optimisation challenges; the kind of problems quantum AI could be well suited to tackle,” he said.
He also expects to see consolidation among quantum hardware providers, along with increased involvement from major cloud platforms.
“Microsoft has already made its intentions clear. Satya Nadella has laid out where he wants the company to go. I think we’ll see AWS, GCP, and others follow suit. As more players move into this space, hardware costs will come down. But for that to translate into enterprise use, providers like us need to be able to scale the technology for real-world, quantum-like projects,” he noted.
Day added that while there is readiness around research and education in quantum, widespread adoption will still take time.
“The cost of compute needs to come down. The barriers to entry have to be low enough that even mid-sized and smaller businesses can use this, much like what we saw with generative AI,” he said.
Business moves
Asked about the potential impact of US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy, Day viewed it as one of several disruptions the company has had to navigate.
“We’ve dealt with supply chain issues, COVID, and broader economic shifts for a long time. SAS is profitable and we carry no debt, so that gives us a strong financial position regardless of how the tariffs play out. There’s a lot of commentary out there — the news, economists — but we haven’t seen much impact yet. If tariffs stick around for a year, there will likely be some effect. But right now, we’re in a stable financial state, and we’ll see where things go,” he said.
In November 2024, SAS acquired synthetic data company Hazy as part of its generative AI strategy. Day didn’t elaborate on the acquisition but said the data space continues to evolve rapidly.
“We have strong data management capabilities, but I think we’ll see more companies move into data provision. There’s growing activity in the market as organisations explore ways to work with non-personally identifiable data. The challenge is figuring out how to incorporate that data into analytics to enable faster, better decisions. That’s an area we’re exploring, particularly within our fraud, risk, and customer intelligence businesses,” he said.
Looking ahead, Day said SAS is aiming to make data, analytics, and AI more accessible to users across roles by the end of the decade.
“You don’t need to be a data scientist or a programmer anymore. What SAS enables is the ability to bring together different personas. Think of how people speaking different languages can still collaborate effectively — it’s the same idea. Whether you’re a SAS programmer, open source developer, business analyst, or computer scientist, the ability to work together within one technology improves productivity and speeds up decision-making. That’s where we see ourselves in 2030,” he said.
