Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2024 was about Agentforce, its low-code platform that allows customers to build an AI agent within minutes. Tableau, the data visualisation company acquired by Salesforce in 2019, also announced Tableau Einstein, which is powered by Agentforce.
Tableau Einstein integrates with Salesforce’s platform and other existing Tableau functionalities. With Einstein, the company aims to shift analytics away from traditional reports and dashboards– something business intelligence and analytics tools have been known for historically—to deliver insights seamlessly within the user’s workflow.
Speaking with AIM at the sidelines of Dreamforce, Ryan Aytay, CEO at Tableau, said generative AI, at this point in time, could do, at least in analytics, what a novice analyst could do.
“As the technology gets better, faster, we can leverage some of these new models that are coming out. It can become more autonomous,” he said.
With AI agents coming into the picture, customers will be able to receive insights from their data autonomously. This means you won’t have to prompt an LLM to get the desired results, which is the case with generative AI today.
Renamed from Einstein Copilot for Tableau–Tableau Einstein integrates with several Salesforce tools, facilitating the creation of semantic models using real-time customer data and providing a marketplace for sharing analytical assets within organisations.
( Ryan Aytay addressing the keynote session at Dreamforce 2024)
AI Agent- Driven Analytics
The data visualisation software company made Tableau Pulse and Tableau Agents generally available to customers earlier this year.
Explaining Tableau Einstein further, Aytay said, “With Pulse metrics for travel and expenses, for instance, you could ask a Tableau agent to create an automated system that monitors these metrics. If spending exceeds a certain threshold, the agent can take action by triggering a Salesforce workflow, sending an email or Slack message to the entire sales team, and initiating an approval process for travel,” Aytay said.
The traditional approach involved a Tableau user querying their organisation’s data, reviewing the dashboards and reports generated from that query, and deriving insights to guide their decisions. This entire process could be automated with AI agents.
Aytay also stressed that we are in the initial stage of AI agents, and they will only improve further as we go forward. “We envision a future where you can create an agent for any analytical insight you desire and then publish it. This would allow you to share it in a marketplace, making it accessible to your employees,” he added.
The Tableau marketplace is a feature that will be part of Tableau Einstein and is expected to be made generally available sometime next year. In the marketplace, AI agents built by the enterprise will autonomously generate insights by querying the organisation’s data. These insights will then be made available on the marketplace, ensuring easy access for all employees within the enterprise.
Soon AI will Reason for Enterprises
Aytay believes that as businesses start to embrace AI even more, the focus will shift from traditional reporting to proactive insights. Going forward, AI will not just change the business intelligence space but also be able to reason for enterprises.
“For instance, if last quarter a specific region encountered a pipeline issue and we implemented four strategies to address it, the system might recommend that we avoid those same strategies in the upcoming quarter and instead suggest alternatives based on successes in other areas of the business. This ability to analyse and reason across the organisation signifies a significant paradigm shift,” Aytay explained.
It will allow employees to focus less on administrative data tasks and more on high-value activities. “Consequently, we may see an increase in customer-facing roles and a decrease in the number of individuals solely engaged in data entry and coding,” he added.
It’s All About Data Cloud
While agents do bring a paradigm shift and promise value for enterprises, Tableau Einstein is only available with Tableau+ subscription.
Moreover, for these AI agents to deliver the best results, they need access to good data. The better the data, the better the outcomes. This is where Salesforce’s Data Cloud comes in. Unveiled at Dreamforce 2023, Data Cloud – which unifies all the enterprise data sources from data lakes, data warehouses, social media channels, etc., in one place– is Salesforce’s fastest-growing product ever.
Data Cloud’s integration with Tableau Einstein facilitates data to be accessible in real-time. Data Cloud will also enable Tableau+ users to access unstructured data.
Historically, analytical tools have only processed structured data and often unstructured data such as text, images and video/ audio files remain untapped. With Tableau Einstein, enterprises can now tap into unstructured data through Data Cloud and derive insights.
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