As a heavy Tableau user for well over a decade, my ears pricked up when I saw Tableau (well Matthew Miller) present a demo of Tableau Next at a mini-conference in London in 2024. A number of questions ran through my mind and now Tableau Next is approaching General Release, I can start to answer some of these questions for myself and you.
1. What is Tableau Next?
If you read the marketing material for Tableau Next, you will see a lot of terminology.
“Tableau Next is a flexible, API-first analytics experience that integrates the #1 analytics platform with Agentforce, the world’s first digital labor platform. Built on a composable architecture, with a unified data layer and trusted semantics, it delivers personalized, contextual, and actionable insights to every user.”
For me, this obfuscates what the product really is. Tableau Next in my mind is Tableau built more natively into a Salesforce environment. Rather than being a desktop application, it’s a browser based experience. Tableau Cloud already offers creating analytical products in-browser, but not in a user-interface that will feel very familiar for regular salesforce users.
Tableau Next is offering additional capability at launch that isn’t available in the current Tableau Platform like a new Semantic Modelling layer. This largely comes in the form of Concierge. All of the new capability is leaning towards getting the data and analytics you create ready for adding agentic artificial intelligence capability. This first comes in the form of Concierge which is a natural language (i.e. type in a question the way you’d normally ask a colleague) tool that will answer analytical questions on root causes, trends and outliers.
Now of course you won't find all of Tableau's 20 years of functionality development in Tableau Next, but there's more than you might be expecting including calculated fields, table calcs and event level of detail calculations. We're looking forward to seeing more chart options and customisation landing in the future.
2. Is it going to replace Tableau Desktop & Cloud when it’s released?
I’m not privy to Tableau and Salesforce’s plans but I don’t expect Tableau Desktop and Cloud to disappear anytime soon. You could easily see these products as completely different tools for different audiences. Tableau Next is Tableau in the Salesforce environment but set up to utilise natural language prompts more than drag and drop analytics.
Both the existing Tableau platform and Next are probably needed at the same time. There are many of our clients and users who use Tableau with many non-Salesforce centric data sets and environments. That’s actually one of the main reasons I started using Tableau in the first place, it connected to many different data sources and was largely data source agnostic. I don’t expect this to change any time soon but the growth in Salesforce’s Data Cloud may change that dynamic depending on how it’s adoption grows over time.
3. Who’s the potential audience for Tableau Next?
Tableau users utilising Data Cloud or other Salesforce products will be the prime target audience but they won’t be the main beneficiaries here. Salesforce users who want to be able to analyse more about their organisations, form data sources that are ready for agentic analysis and share the outcomes without leaving the Salesforce ecosystem will be.
Building analysis in Tableau and then embedding within Salesforce has rarely been straight-forward for many users without having to revert to asking for help from specialists or IT colleagues. Now, with Tableau capability within the Salesforce ecosystem from the moment you are creating the analysis, deploying these insights and actioning them across your Salesforce organisation will be a lot easier.
There will still be a learning curve for those who want to edit and delve deeper than what the AI functionality initially creates but those first steps will be easier and allow more people to see and understand their data. This is where Concierge will come to the fore by allowing natural language questions to kickstart your analytical process rather than having to learn how to interact with the Tableau interface.
4. How complete is Tableau Next compared to Tableau’s normal platform?
With semantic models and the ability to create dashboards, Tableau Next has a lot of the feel of Tableau. However, very quickly, experienced Tableau users may stumble over elements that you want to be able to control further; being selective over the colours for your categorical variables for example.
However, can you get analytical answers from your datasets, absolutely, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t start exploring now.
5. What should you do next?
Try it! After ten years of consultancy, I’ve learned that no two companies are alike. To understand what benefits you and your organisation may get from Tableau Next, you need to start using it and providing feedback to Tableau as to what you want them to focus on next.
Lots of The Information Lab team are exploring Tableau Next so if you have any questions that aren’t asked / answered above then please get in contact with us.