**London**: Salesforce unveils Tableau Next, an innovative AI-powered analytics platform featuring agentic analytics to address growing executive concerns over data reliability and boost data literacy, promising automated insights and seamless integration for improved decision-making in business environments.
Salesforce has unveiled Tableau Next, a new analytics platform described as the world’s first “agentic analytics” system that leverages artificial intelligence to revolutionise how businesses derive insights from their data. The announcement comes amid growing concern among business leaders about the reliability of their data, despite intensified demands for data-driven decision-making.
The launch takes place against a backdrop of mounting uncertainty about data quality in corporate environments. Research conducted by Salesforce among more than 500 US business leaders reveals a significant decline in confidence regarding data reliability — from 54% in 2023 to just 40% in 2025. At the same time, 76% of respondents feel increased pressure to support their business decisions with data, underscoring a gap between expectations and trust.
This loss of confidence is further compounded by workforce challenges. Although 86% of professionals link their career success to data literacy, over half find it difficult to independently analyse and interpret data. Moreover, a critical imbalance exists between the demand for rapid insights and the availability of analytical support: 85% of executives require insights in under 30 minutes, but only 49% have access to analyst resources, creating a notable shortfall.
Additional findings emphasise misalignment between data strategies and business priorities, with fewer than half of leaders stating their data initiatives are completely aligned — a decline of 14 percentage points compared with 2023.
Amid this landscape, Tableau Next offers a novel approach through what Salesforce terms “agentic analytics,” shifting from traditional business intelligence to AI-driven reasoning within data workflows. Southard Jones, Chief Product Officer at Tableau, explained during the product announcement, “In the past, you were always able to ask questions of your data. With BI we have been doing that for many years. Now you actually have something that can reason for you.”
The platform features three specialised AI agents, each designed to automate and enhance distinct parts of the analytics process:
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Data Pro: Automates the conversion of raw data into business language and streamlines the usually laborious extract, transform, load (ETL) procedures.
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Concierge: Provides a natural language interface, allowing business users to pose questions in everyday terms and receive visualisations and tailored recommendations.
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Inspector: Continuously monitors data to identify emerging patterns and uncover insights that might be overlooked by human analysts.
Jones highlighted a traditional limitation of business intelligence by noting, “One of the fallacies of BI and analytics in the 20 years I’ve been doing it is that it assumes the human knows the question to ask. What if I don’t ask the question? Then the insight is missed.”
Tableau Next is constructed on a four-layer architecture designed to ensure accessibility and integration: an open data platform that supports structured, unstructured, and streaming data; an AI-powered semantic layer translating raw data into business-relevant language; a visualisation layer that delivers portable insights; and a workflow engine that links insights directly to actions within existing applications.
Early adopters of Tableau technologies have started to experience the benefits of this approach. Robbie Malik, Global CIO at Box, shared his perspective regarding Tableau Pulse, an earlier Tableau product used by Box’s security team: “When we have an incident, mean time to respond, mean time to contain, mean time to resolve – these are things that are very critical in the security organisation. We want that data real-time to see what’s happening.”
The introduction of agentic analytics is positioned as a significant evolution in the field of business intelligence, aimed at bridging the widening confidence gap among executives and empowering broader data literacy. Both Jones and Malik emphasised that the new AI agents are designed to augment, not replace, the role of data analysts. Jones stated, “We might need more of them now. They might spend a lot less time doing admin tasks and more time doing valuable tasks.” Malik echoed this, saying, “This isn’t about replacing people wholesale. This is about replacing activities that they do today.”
Tableau Next is now generally available with the Tableau+ SKU. Within the platform, Tableau Semantics can be accessed immediately, while the Concierge and Data Pro agents are scheduled for general availability in June 2025. The Inspector agent will follow later in 2025.
This launch highlights a key paradox confronting organisations today: as the volume of data continues to expand, executive trust in that data diminishes. Tableau Next’s agentic analytics seek to resolve this by breaking down technical barriers and automating insight generation, potentially increasing trust through the consistent application of definitions and proactive pattern recognition.
For the Salesforce ecosystem, Tableau Next represents a strategic integration that combines Tableau’s long-standing visualisation capabilities with Salesforce’s growing AI expertise. By embedding analytics directly into workflows and commonly used applications, Salesforce aims to increase the operational use of data insights while diminishing the friction between insight discovery and action.
The platform’s future impact will depend on its ability to demonstrate improved trust in data and analytic outcomes. Should it succeed, Tableau Next could represent a transformative step in how organisations extract significant business value from their expanding data assets.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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