By Karen Peattie
SAS, a global leader in analytics, has signalled further confidence in its Scottish research and development (R&D) business by further expanding its centre in Glasgow and recruiting talent predominantly from Scottish universities.
David Macdonald, executive vice-president and chief sales officer at SAS, flew into Scotland yesterday to make the announcement and pointed to Scotland's talent pool of skilled data science graduates as one of the reasons of its investment in the country.
North Carolina-based SAS established it R&D centre in 2014 in Argyle Street, Glasgow. "It is performing well and we've doubled the size of it to around 100 employees since then," Mr Macdonald said. "SAS will now expand it by a further 20 per cent in 2020, investing in a team of highly skilled data scientists to focus on technology development."
Alongside its recent investment in the Bayes Centre – a major scientific research centre created by the University of Edinburgh in 2018 – this further investment by SAS in Glasgow underlines the group’s commitment to supporting public and private sector ambitions in Scotland, Mr Macdonald added.
The R&D centre in Scotland is one of only four major global R&D centres based outside the company's global headquarters in the US and forms part of its ongoing investment in AI (artificial intelligence).
Last year, SAS announced a $1 billion investment in AI, covering three main areas: R&D innovation; education initiatives addressing customer needs to better understand and benefit from AI; and expert services to optimise customer return on AI projects.
SAS’s investment comes off the back of significant success associated with projects either led by or jointly supported by its Scottish R&D centre in AI, advanced analytics and visual analytics which address client issues relating to areas such as fraud, risk, compliance, customer intelligence, and data management.
Mr Macdonald said: "We came to Glasgow after acquiring a business and decided to invest here and harness the talent in the city and across Scotland."
SAS, he said, was committed to working with others to build Scotland's growing reputation as a "truly significant regional player in the enormous and rapidly expanding global AI and advanced analytics market".
The centre, he said, made a notable contribution to the development of SAS’s groundbreaking Visual Investigator solution which is being deployed by major public sector organisations around the globe in a bid to reduce fraud, error and improve compliance.
It is estimated that the systems supported by Visual Investigator will allow the UK Government to either recover or save many billions of pounds which can be redirected back into mainline Government services.
SAS says it is estimated that anything from £31bn to £49bn of public sector money is lost to fraud and error each year in the UK.
“We recognise that the latest AI and advanced analytics technologies have the power to deliver massive improvements in efficiency and innovation, as well as tackling problems such as the huge amount lost to the private and public sector – including citizens everywhere – due to fraud,” Mr Macdonald said.
“At SAS we’re proud to be leading on innovation in this area, with expertise built up over more than 40 years and considerable investment into R&D which is above the industry average. We know the opportunity is there for all organisations to use AI and analytics to better understand themselves and the world around them, so they can ultimately make better, faster decisions."
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