SAS strikes first partnership with fellow Cary tech firm Epic Games

Driving the news: The news came at SAS's annual innovation conference, which has placed a heavy emphasis on the addition of artificial intelligence tools as the company ramps up for a potential initial public offering.

State of play: Digital twins are virtual recreations of physical objects that SAS said its customers can use to glean real-world data and forecast how new systems could operate.

• The twins are made using Epic's Unreal Engine, a powerful visualization tool that has been used in everything from its "Fortnite" video game to television shows like "The Mandalorian."
• Epic Games uses an app it created called RealityScan to take photos of a real-world space and then import into its Unreal Engine, transferring a one-to-one 3D replica inside the visualization engine.
• SAS's analytics tools can then hook up to the engine and take data from whatever simulation its customer wishes to run.

Zoom in: So far, SAS is using the tool with its manufacturing customer Georgia-Pacific at its paper mill in Georgia.

• Georgia-Pacific is asking SAS to simulate multiple scenarios of how new automated guided vehicles could impact the operations of its paper mill, and is taking data from the virtual simulations before implementing them in the real world.