Clad in a plain white shirt, Jim Goodnight, billionaire cofounder and CEO of analytics firm SAS, eases into a leather rolling chair in a Cary, North Carolina, meeting room that looks less like a corner office than a geology exhibit. Behind him are glistening gemstones. A clump of pyrite. Purple amethysts. A fossilized dinosaur egg—a 69-million-year-old Hadrosaurus found in the Gobi Desert. A meteorite. “It’s not something you want to get hit in the head by,” he deadpans.

SAS is 50. Its CEO is 83. And like the rocks on display, both are artifacts from an earlier time long before fast-growing, deeply-unprofitable AI shook the world. SAS analyzes large troves of data from its customers in real-time to help them make better business decisions.

“People like to dismiss us by saying, ‘well, that’s legacy software,’” Goodnight, a statistics pioneer who helped define what analytics would be long before AI became an umbrella term for everything. “But it’s not. We’ve been improving it for 50 years.”

Now SAS has to prove that endurance isn’t the same thing as stagnation.

The company generates just over $3 billion in annual revenue from most of the Fortune 100—including 90% of the financial services companies and all of the health and life sciences firms, plus most every government department. It has stayed private, profitable and debt free.

The AI boom is stress-testing that posture. OpenAI, Anthropic and a swarm of newer data-and-analytics rivals are selling the future as a clean break from “legacy” incumbents. Hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon are bundling data and AI into cloud contracts. Public-sector competition is heating up. And inside SAS, the next chapter is no longer theoretical: Goodnight has been hinting for years at a leadership transition, including an IPO as a possible succession plan. “When we go public, we need a different CEO,” he says. “You don’t want an old fart like me going around trying to sell stock.”

For a company designed to outlast market volatility, an uncomfortable question is suddenly immediate: can SAS modernize fast enough to matter in the AI era—without abandoning the slow, profitable discipline that made it an outlier in the first place? And can it do it without Goodnight?

Goodnight is confident it can; he’s seen this cycle before: the dot-com boom, when he considered outside money and passed; the dot-com bust, which rewarded that restraint; failed investments, including an airline; and the 2022 market correction which may have forced SAS to delay its IPO plans. He’s unmoved by the idea that generative AI has rewritten the laws of business.

AI is “just picking the next word in a sentence based on probability,” Goodnight says, correctly, of large language models. “How’s that going to solve anything?” He thinks SAS’ decades of customer trust and “domain expertise,” particularly in finance, healthcare and government services, will help it retain its edge.

Yet Goodnight will likely leave SAS’ future in the age of AI to younger hands.

In recent years, he has ceded more of the daily operating work to a new generation of executives, especially chief technology officer Bryan Harris and chief operating officer Gavin Day. Goodnight says........

© Forbes