Tableau launched a series of updates to its platform including Tableau Pulse, which aims to bring analytics and insights directly to business users.
The move to provide automated insights and personalized analytics via Tableau Pulse recognizes a key issue: Many data consumers track dashboards sporadically. Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen said Tableau Pulse can make the analytics platform more prescriptive.
"In addition to pattern analysis against the graph of user and data interactions, Pulse also enables individuals and subject matter experts to clearly define what’s important to specific users and groups and to deliver alerts, driver analyses and recommendations to those users so they can take action proactively to get performance back on track or do more of what’s working well."
The news, delivered at Tableau Conference, comes as Salesforce, owner of Tableau, integrates more of its technology. For instance, Tableau will incorporate Salesforce's Einstein generative AI with the launch of Tableau GPT. Salesforce Data Cloud for Tableau also adds more customer data integration.
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Here's a look at the key items and Henschen's take:
Tableau GPT can generate visualizations based on natural language prompts with progress and recommendations. Tableau GPT is a "reimagining of Tableau" using natural language.
Henschen: "Tableau and Salesforce acquired Narrative Science, one of the industry’s leading NLP vendors, a couple of years ago. I expect that the technology and expertise gained through that acquisition will help give Salesforce and Tableau a leg up in exploiting generative AI capabilities, but we’ll have to wait to see the proof in generally available functionality."
Tableau Pulse will feature tight integrations with Slack and email so people can collaborate on insights.
Henschen: "Pulse is not available yet, but the promise is that it will spot what data and metrics are important to specific users and groups and when those metrics are changing and why. Alerts and explanations can go a long way toward driving action. Assuming Pulse delivers as promised, it could be a tremendous boon to personal and group productivity and proactive responses to changing conditions."
Tableau Data Cloud will unify corporate data across interactions into one view with Instant Analytics.
Henschen: "The Tableau Data Cloud is a lakehouse architecture that’s bringing all the advantages of such platforms to Salesforce customers, including those using Tableau. Advantages include bringing together all your disparate data, separating compute and storage decisions, and enabling many types of analysis and many different use cases against the data cloud without replication and redundant copies of data. There are many business benefits, but it’s the data engineers, analysts and Salesforce administrators who will be the ones that implement it."