Marketers have another new software-as-a-service platform, SAS AI Navigator. It’s designed to help teams track, govern and intervene in their use of AI during the campaign process.
Announced at SAS Innovate in Dallas, Reggie Townsend, SAS’ global vice president of AI ethics, said the platform gives marketing teams visibility into their full AI inventory, organising systems around specific use cases while aligning them with internal policies and external regulations.
B&T sat down with Townsend to understand what that looks like inside a marketing team increasingly reliant on AI for content, targeting and customer engagement. A comprehensive analysis revealed in late 2025 found 88 per cent of marketers now use AI daily.
Townsend highlighted a key focus of AI Navigator is not just tracking AI usage in the campaign process, but “alerting marketers when they need to step in”.
“The technology says ‘This is high risk, you need to treat this differently’,” Townsend said. “And now the human has to intersect with that and say, ‘What do I need to do differently?’”
Rather than fully automating decisions, the platform is more like an oversight layer, designed to flag risk in real time while keeping humans accountable.
For example, a team running a personalised email campaign using customer data may see certain use cases flagged if they involve sensitive information or stricter regulatory environments. In those cases, marketers are then prompted to review how data is being used before campaigns scale further.
Similarly, if AI-generated campaign copy begins to drift from brand guidelines, or a chatbot moves into higher-risk territory in customer interactions, the platform allows teams to trace those outputs back to the underlying models and intervene quickly.
“What Navigator does is allow for that centralised visibility of all use cases,” Townsend said. “Then what models, what agents and what policies are associated with those.”
He said the need for that kind of visibility is growing as AI adoption accelerates across marketing departments, often in a fragmented way.
“Where else do you find a compilation of all of the ways that you’re using AI right now?” Townsend said. “That stuff is spread, even if it’s just within a marketing department.”
At the same time, the speed of AI-driven campaigns is increasing the stakes. Issues that once took days to surface can now emerge in minutes across multiple channels.
“The likelihood of something happening at a faster rate is much higher now,” Townsend said.
He believes that makes accountability a central concern, particularly for lean marketing teams.
Townsend said AI Navigator is a way to operationalise accountability by embedding governance directly into marketing campaign workflows. Rather than treating oversight as a separate step, the platform allows teams to predefine how they will respond to specific scenarios, effectively building playbooks that can be executed when risks are flagged.
As he explained, this approach is designed to make response processes more repeatable when issues arise.
“Here’s our way of addressing situation X, so in the event that it occurs, we already know what our plan for remediation is,” he said.
While the platform adds structure and visibility, Townsend emphasised that it is not intended to replace human decision-making in marketing teams.
“The tech won’t do that. That’s determined by how marketing teams manage their internal response processes,” he said.
Instead, AI Navigator is designed to support marketers in managing AI at scale, particularly in areas where it is already widely used, such as content creation and copy development.
“A lot of what marketing is, there’s a lot of text basis and copy to the profession,” Townsend said. “LLMs do a tremendous job with text.”
He also pointed to the practical realities facing lean or stretched teams, where AI can help maintain output when resources are limited.
“Imagine I lose some of my copywriters, or I just can’t find them,” he said. “There are right ways to take advantage of AI.”
B&T travelled to Dallas as a guest of SAS.
