Driving Adoption

Training and Tier-One Support

Non-Judgmental Culture: A programmer with decades of SAS experience may not want to ask how to do a pivot table in R - fear of “looking like a newbie” is a real barrier
Workshops and Side-by-Side Tooling: Using Positron with the VS Code SAS extension lets teams work in both languages side by side
AI as a Learning Buddy: Encouraging users to ask AI to teach them R (and translate their SAS code) helps overcome the fear of asking colleagues

Deployment and Environment

Cost Shifts, It Doesn’t Disappear: Moving from SAS licenses to open source isn’t automatic savings - the spend just moves to infrastructure and platform work
Frictionless End-User Experience: Users want to open a tool, do their work, and not fight with environments that fail to load or packages that aren’t available
DevOps Skills Bundled In: People comfortable with open source tend to arrive with Git, package management, and Unix skills - a bonus beyond just R proficiency

Business Drivers

Talent Acquisition: Finding people who want to work in SAS is getting harder - a major driver for the shift to open source
The COBOL Analogy: Long-tenured SAS programmers near end of career have little incentive to change - they may become the highly-paid, scarce specialists of the future
Time to Learn: Programmers are too busy day-to-day to learn on their own - enterprises must invest the time and create dedicated learning environments; PositConf talks over the years have highlighted this
Not a Quick Fix: Change takes time; people must be given time - this cannot be rushed

AI’s Role in Adoption

Best for Intermediate → Advanced: AI is very helpful for programmers moving from beginner/intermediate to advanced R, less so for going from nothing to R
SAS → R Translation: A powerful onboarding technique is taking SAS code, asking AI to write the equivalent in R, and having it explain what it did
Learning Too Fast?: Concern that going straight from idea to outcome via AI skips the fundamentals - people may not learn what’s happening in the middle

Change Fatigue is Broader Than SAS → R

“You Won Me Over When I Saw a Shiny App”: But now the same people are told to learn R, environments, packages, and everything else - the surrounding ecosystem is a stumbling block for people coming from a highly-structured SAS environment
RStudio → Positron: Migration currently in progress at many organizations - painful for people who worked in RStudio their entire careers
Quarto and Beyond: Other tooling changes (like Quarto) add to the cumulative change load

Overall Takeaway

Adoption is fundamentally a people problem. Provide non-judgmental support, give people time, use AI as a translation and tutoring aid, and remember that “change management” is now a continuous state - it’s not just about SAS to R, but a stack of overlapping tooling transitions.