Marinela Profi
Global AI/GenAI Market Strategy Lead,
SAS
Brian Jackson
Principal Research Director,
Info-Tech Research Group
Dan Finerty
Senior Systems Engineer,
SAS
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are driving
competition among Canadian businesses, but how
businesses adopt emerging technology, like generative AI, is critical.
While uptake varies by industry, the motivation behind AI modernization comes from the need to be more efficient and produce results faster. In 2022, the world was introduced to ChatGPT and businesses quickly jumped into action, trying to leverage and adopt generative AI (GenAI). Today, business leaders and IT decision-makers face enormous pressure to harness the potential of GenAI to generate business value.
“This is 90 per cent of the conversations I’ve been having over the past year and a half,” says Marinela Profi, Global AI/GenAI Market Strategy Lead at SAS, a leader in helping its customers use data and AI effectively, with trust, and with confidence to grow their business. “We’ve already seen how rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated AI into mainstream use, and it will only become faster.”
GenAI adoption — a closer look
GenAI (a subset of AI) can produce new content, including text, audio, video, and images, based on user input. Having natural language processing serve as the backbone of GenAI has also unlocked potential for non-technical people to harness automation and benefit from expert insights. While early implementations have had issues with accuracy, Profi is excited by the technology’s inherent capability to solve complex challenges and functions that could impact us in positive ways; for example by designing new drugs, developing products, redesigning processes, and creating efficiencies in supply chains.
But creating real business value out of GenAI is easier said than done. In a recent global study SAS commissioned with Coleman Parkes Research Ltd., 1,600 global decision-makers reported some obstacles in the implementation of GenAI, including insufficient internal expertise, challenges transitioning from the conceptual phase to practical use, and difficulty proving return on investment. The ROI challenge was cited by 45 per cent of Canadian respondents, compared to 36 per cent globally.
Transformative tech
Brian Jackson, Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group, says AI was the most rapidly adopted emerging technology in 2023, and according to Info-Tech’s Tech Trends 2025 report, AI received more net-new investment from organizations than any other technology heading into 2024. The expectation is that AI will break through the “emerging” threshold and become a transformative technology alongside cloud computing and cybersecurity in 2026. This will only intensify with the continued proliferation of GenAI use cases.
“GenAI’s broad applicability and promise to automate tasks that previously seemed to depend on humans hold powerful allure,” says Jackson.
According to Profi, some highly competitive sectors, such as banking and telecommunications, have seen positive results from their adoption of GenAI. But others, including energy and utilities, have been slower to adopt the technology, allocating a lot of the innovation to less consumer-facing use cases and operational stability. Banks and telecom companies are seeing more mature AI and GenAI use cases flourish in the form of enhanced complaints management systems and AI-powered customer support agents.
Organizations that are succeeding with GenAI are the ones that recognize that LLMs alone won’t solve business problems.
“Organizations that are succeeding with GenAI are the ones that recognize that LLMs alone won’t solve business problems,” says Profi. “When it comes to enterprise adoption of AI, you need a clear blueprint that involves people, process and technology. And in the GenAI driven innovation, people and process have never been more important.”
AI you can trust
Globally there is a lot of experimentation with GenAI, but Canada lags some countries in the use of and full implementation of GenAI, including China, the UK, the U.S., and Australia. Dan Finerty, Senior Systems Engineer at SAS, says some of this can be attributed to Canada’s conservative approach to tech adoption.
“Canada is recognized as a global leader in data rights and privacy, which is good for Canadians,” he explains. “The emphasis on compliance is positive, but it contributes to a conservative approach to AI. Canada isn’t far behind the trailblazers, but there’s a focus on adopting AI responsibly, instead of rushing in and creating harm.”
However, many organizations still lack full oversight of the AI tools in their own environment and the majority are at risk of non-compliance when it comes to risk. SAS research shows that only 1 in 10 organizations in Canada have undergone the preparation needed to comply with GenAI regulations, only five per cent of Canadian businesses have a comprehensive governance framework for GenAI, and almost 80 per cent are concerned about data privacy and security.
Jackson says having a better understanding of which tasks need the help of AI and GenAI solutions will help overcome some of the challenges related to compliance and developing a framework.
“Not every task boils down to receiving exactly the right answer, and that’s where these core foundation models can provide value with their incredible flexibility and broad knowledge base,” he says. “When we want more expert-oriented results in systems that require specific answers, then we should either use a rules-based deterministic system or more finely-tuned AI models that are purpose built.”
Artificial and human intelligence working together
For data-driven organizations, the productivity of their analytics teams is crucial to business success. Platforms such as SAS Viya can help empower users, regardless of their role, to manage their data and ensure decisions made on behalf of other people are explainable, transparent, and fair.
“Our team can answer, is this a scientific experiment or something that will support the business?” says Finerty. “This technology is so new that people need help understanding what it is, how it can help, and how to deploy it.”
To learn how you can advance your business goals with AI you can trust, visit sas.com/viya.
