At SAS Innovate Singapore, the Enterprise AI Pitch Shifts From Speed to Trust

There's a pattern forming in how vendors talk to Singapore's enterprises in 2026: the conversation has moved from "adopt AI fast" to "govern AI properly". At SAS Innovate Singapore this week, the analytics firm made its version of that pitch — stack agentic AI with generative AI and computer vision rather than deploying agents in a silo, and pair it all with digital twins to see the payoff before scaling it.

Patrick Xhonneux, SAS's senior vice president of marketing, told the Singapore audience that the main goal of agentic AI is to break down silos — data silos and organisational silos — and automate business processes so they can scale. He focused on three things enterprises should get right: managing compound error and risk, building trust, and creating a repeatable blueprint for AI-assisted processes. On digital twins, SAS pointed to its 2025 partnership with Epic Games' Unreal Engine, which combines SAS Viya analytics with 3D simulation; pilots are already running in manufacturing and healthcare, and an oil-and-gas customer is using "digital hedges" built on the stack to detect unsafe working conditions before they cause expensive repairs.

The trust message came through strongest from Craig Jennings, SAS's vice president of financial services for Australia, New Zealand and ASEAN. "Just 12 months ago, organisations were asking, how do we adopt AI as fast as possible? Today, they're asking something much bigger: How do we trust it? How do we govern it, manage it, and attempt to control it? And how do we ensure that every AI investment we make is delivering measurable value?"

The timing is deliberate. SAS's core customer base remains banks and financial services — the same sector Singapore's regulator is now writing agentic AI rules for — and the firm is pushing into manufacturing, healthcare and energy as those industries industrialise AI. The event lands as local enterprises move from pilots to production and discover that the hard part is not the model, but the measurement.

Why it matters for Singapore: SAS chose Singapore for its flagship ASEAN customer event, and the message is aimed squarely at the local enterprise market: AI success will not belong to the organisation that uses the most AI, but to those that apply it transparently, governed, and with measurable value. That framing lines up neatly with where Singapore's own policy is heading — from MAS's agentic AI risk guidelines to the PDPC's transparency code — and gives local CIOs a concrete playbook for defending AI budgets in the boardroom.