WRAL presents a special look at SAS's impact on the Triangle and beyond through an exclusive conversation with founder and CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight. This is a transcript of that full conversation.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: Dr. Goodnight, thank you so much for doing this.
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Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Certainly. We'd be glad to.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: Talk about industries. What industries are using SAS?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Almost every major bank is using SAS for a credit card fraud. When you present a credit card to a merchant, we have 30 milliseconds to say yes or no whether or not we accept it. There's a lot of fast computing going on to decide, well, does this pattern of expenditure match this person's past history? Most every major pharmaceutical company uses SAS. And we have manufacturing as a big user.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: Did you ever have any idea when you started, when you founded the company, it was going to grow into all of these...
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Industries? No. We were hoping to make it through the first year. Of course, we had just left, so all four of us that started the company had left good-paying jobs at NC State where we had health insurance and everything, and we were going off on our own. Most of us were in our 30s by the time we left and had kids. That's one of the reasons we established sort of a nine-to-five working time because we had to drop kids off at school before we came to work. So we were one of the first nine-to-five companies around.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: Is that one of the reasons you really worked to make this place so different?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Well, a lot of it goes back to the year I spent in Florida working on the Apollo program. They had guards checking us in in the morning, and they had machines in the hallway that dispensed stale coffee that you had to pay for. It was just not a very friendly environment. When we moved out to Cary, there was a two-lane road called Harrison that went into Cary, which is three or four miles away. And there were no places to eat out here.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: SAS built a cafe on campus. It was just the beginning.
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: One of our founders, Jane Hellwig, had a baby and she was talking about quitting work to raise her baby. And I said, "Well, let's do a daycare here for you."
Cristin Severance/WRAL: Many of the benefits SAS pioneered are now industry standard. Google visited SAS to study its employee-first culture. What role do you think SAS has played in putting the state, North Carolina, on the map as a technology center?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Well, I think we've proven that it can be done. We've got some great universities right here with NC State and Carolina and Duke. So the recruiting of talent is fairly easy.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: What advice would you give high school students wanting to go into the technology field?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Well, get involved in STEM. That's the thing that really makes a difference.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: What advice would you give the next generation of innovators in North Carolina?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Well, I think they're going to have to be prepared to learn a little bit more about artificial intelligence. Generative AI has taken over the classical AI. The previous AI was built around using machine language to develop models to do forecasting with. Now, GenAI is being used to create answers to problems.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: What about the criticism that thinking and trying to find the answer is part of the process?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Well, I agree. Generative AI is not going to replace humans. It can be used by humans to make the performance in their job a little bit faster and a little bit better. But humans need to be part of the loop.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: What's ahead for SAS?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Well, we are adding right now a lot of generative AI features to SAS. When we find a money laundering situation, we will then use AI to explain exactly what we found. We don't use AI to produce answers, but we use it to try to explain the answers.
We are working on a number of research areas. One of them is quantum computing. Quantum computing has made great strides in the hardware. The software is still lagging behind quite a bit because of the lack of algorithms that we can use to run, but we've got a dedicated group that is working on computation using those computers.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: Many tech companies can't say they've made it to 50 years. How did you do that, and how are you planning to last another 50?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Well, I think one of the main reasons is that we have developed software that people need to use that answers questions to try to improve productivity, improve revenue, prevent credit card losses, prevent all sorts of fraud. The fact that we've always centered on developing products that are in demand has kept us, I think, in business for 50 years.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: Why did you stay in North Carolina?
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: Well, I was born in North Carolina, and I was raised here in North Carolina. So North Carolina's home.
Cristin Severance/WRAL: You said something in the documentary, something about people. If you treat people a certain way...
Dr. Jim Goodnight/SAS CEO and Founder: I say if you treat people like they make a difference, they will make a difference.