Here's why I don't agree with you: Tableau Conference 2026

0:00If you're here to find out what I think about Tableau Conference, yeah, this video is very late.

0:05This time last week, I had a completely different video in mind.

0:09I was going to go through the whole Tableau conference, break it down as I usually do, potentially do some reactions.

0:14I'll probably still do that later this week or next week.

0:18And before I posted, I saw some perspectives on LinkedIn.

0:22And I thought, wow, these are so different to the opinion I had.

0:26And what was interesting about just waiting, because for the first time I went into a Tableau conference without really knowing what was in the keynote.

0:36To give you some context, in the past, I've always been able to get, let's say, a preview or a perspective on some of the content in the keynote, but I've never seen the keynote as a whole piece before.

0:48That never happens.

0:49But I always have some sort of sense of direction.

0:52For the first time in five years, I watched the conference for the first time like everyone else.

0:56And this year I wasn't at the event.

0:58I wasn't in San Diego.

0:59I was watching it remote.

1:01So I only watched the main Tableau keynote and Devs on Stage.

1:04Those were the sort of two things I used.

1:06And I have to call out that if you're not there, you can't really judge the atmosphere.

1:10So I'm not going to be sat here telling you what it's like or what the mid was in the room.

1:14But I can have a perspective on what was presented.

1:17And I think what is presented is a very deliberate choice.

1:19Let's call that intent.

1:21And you'll understand why I'm calling it that in a second.

1:24And so what I've struggled with for the last week is just trying to understand why can't I reconcile all these different perspectives from the conference?

1:33Why is it for the first time that actually I struggle to really agree with many of the perspectives?

1:39Whilst there might be bits that I like and bits that I agree with, I just do not agree with the majority of the perspectives that have been out there.

1:45Maybe I'm out of touch.

1:46Maybe I'm moving on.

1:47You tell me.

1:48But I do have a thesis of why this is.

1:51And I think this to me is more important than breaking down the keynote.

1:55So if you want to break down the keynote, actually, there's some really incredible features on Google.

1:59Go ahead to the Tableau Conference keynote, and there's uh should be a little ask AI button there.

2:04You can click on that and just talk to the video, and it will tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the keynote.

2:10My brief summary is this.

2:12In the main keynote, we didn't see much new.

2:16In fact, for the first time in a long while, they only showed us capabilities that had already shipped.

2:22If you walked away from the keynote thinking, wow, this is amazing, all of this stuff is new and exciting.

2:28It wasn't.

2:28A lot of that has been announced in the last six months.

2:31If you've been paying attention to many of the people pushing the boundaries of this technologies, most of it has been around actually since the previous conference is set, you know.

2:40Take Tristan, for example, right?

2:42A lot of the things he's been showcasing that's incredible, the stuff that was in Attackathon, he's been building up to this stuff for the last year.

2:49A lot of the capabilities that Will got on stage and showed, again, that was something that has been moving.

2:57MCP has been around for a while.

2:58Tableau is one of the first analytics platforms with the MCP.

3:02But the general gist I took away from the conference is that was a deliberate choice.

3:08Um, you maybe remember my video about whiplash.

3:11You see, whiplash was a side effect of a very very clear process of is what I'm actually going to use, the rubric I'm going to use to explain why we can't reconcile our feelings about conference this year.

3:24And the rubric goes like this First of all, you have the intent.

3:28This is the uh intent by Source Source or Tableau at the keynote or in the presentation to put across a feeling, put across a view.

3:36Essentially, marketing.

3:38It is more or less marketing.

3:39Hey, what are you gonna say about the product?

3:41What are you gonna make the audience feel?

3:43And do you understand your audience well enough to be able to derive that feeling, drive that feeling, conjure up that feeling in the room?

3:50That is essentially what keynotes are about.

3:526,000 people in the room, all from different places, and you need to try and thread some sort of perspective throughout the whole audience.

4:00That is intent.

4:02The next thing is context.

4:04Now, context is very different because context really depends on the individual.

4:09And it depends on everything about the individual that has brought them to that moment.

4:14For some people, it's their first conference.

4:16For others, it's their 20th conference.

4:19That's quite possible.

4:20For some people, they've maybe come to the last few.

4:23Maybe they've been to two, maybe they've been to three.

4:26And for others, they're maybe there to understand what Salesforce is doing as an investor, as a journalist, as a business owner, as someone who drives data in their organization, CDOs, CIOs, um, CTOs, even uh attend these conferences.

4:40And then you've got analysts who are there to understand hey, how is this product going to help frankly accelerate my career?

4:47This is what I've been good at.

4:49I am a tableau visionary, I'm an ambassador.

4:51I have made a great career being a professional in this space.

4:55What has the product got to offer me in this future?

4:58Maybe you're a tableau or Salesforce employee, maybe even you're a former tableau Salesforce employee, and you're at the conference for a different context, and you're trying to understand what is going on with the product, where is it going?

5:11That I'm just going to term as context.

5:14Okay.

5:15And the combination of intent and context to me equals perspective.

5:21Okay.

5:22So when I made the video about Whiplash, Whiplash was this result, the perspective.

5:28It was the perspective that we mostly all walked away from the conference with or leading up to the conference with.

5:33It was this feeling that we could all agree on.

5:36And the reason we could all agree on it, generally speaking, I'd like to think we all agreed on it because you know I got a pretty positive response, was because we had a shared context, and the intent the Salesforce had was felt the same way.

5:52So intent, context, perspective, whiplash with this perspective.

5:57This year, though, I think the reason we can't reconcile the way we think about conference, the reason we all don't agree is because for the first time in a long while, we all don't have the same shared context for not only where the industry is going, but also where we think we should be going, but then finally where we think the product should be going.

6:18You see, we're all looking to different parts of the products to answer specific things that we'd like to see going forward.

6:26And so for this reason, this is why I've sort of arrived at this point.

6:30Maybe what I've done every single year, just reviewing the context, isn't viable because frankly, I just don't think I could genuinely resonate with the majority of my audience anymore.

6:39We're all looking at things very differently.

6:41Maybe you're uh watching this video as an analyst who's used Tableau for years but is transitioning to Power BI.

6:48Maybe you've seen some of the videos that I've covered in the last uh few months.

6:51I haven't actually made a Tableau video since I became just him, and I've been looking at other tools, and maybe you have a context that is also looking at the landscape, and so you come at this conference from a definite, very different perspective.

7:04Whatever it is, it's a very hard thing to reconcile.

7:09And I really want to drill into this point because I do genuinely think that for the first time in maybe a decade, I say a decade because that's roughly how long I've been in this career.

7:19And when I was learning Tableau, there was a consensus that Tableau was the direction.

7:25Everyone could look at Tableau and go, yes, that's the gold standard.

7:28It's really taking on click, it's taking on micro strategies, taking on Bob J.

7:33Yeah.

7:34All of these things were generally agreed upon in the industry.

7:38And whether or not you had Tableau, you'd agree that Tableau was innovating the space.

7:43So I learned Tableau at that moment in time.

7:45And yeah, I confidently had a shared perspective with the majority of people in the industry.

7:51And I pinned my career to that direction, and here I am.

7:55Now, I think we're at a junction at the moment because I don't think as a community, as former Salesforce employees or Tableau employees, as current Salesforce employees or Tableau employees, as members of the community, as uh CIOs, CDOs, all the personas I mentioned before.

8:14I don't think we all agree about where the future's heading.

8:17Not because we don't know, it's just AI is really challenging many of the perspectives and many of the um let's say formative concepts we've understood to be best practice in our field.

8:31And so for that reason, Salesforce was never gonna come to this keynote and knock it out of the park.

8:36And so, you know, for the first time, I'm actually sat here saying, Hey, I think they did a good job because they were never going to be able to do the best job.

8:44The different perspectives in the room doesn't allow it.

8:47But what they did do is ground themselves to something, something tangible, something the product can do today.

8:53And I think that's you know, that's the kind of thing I've been critiquing them about in the past years.

8:59Yes, some of the demos were still like not real things.

9:02I know, I know, okay.

9:03Some of them were running on VMs somewhere else, right?

9:07But nonetheless, there was definitely a very clear post to show, not tell.

9:13And actually, that's something that Mark Reesha said.

9:15Okay.

9:16So that is sort of what I want to open with in this video.

9:19Now, the next thing I want to touch on very, very briefly, I'm looking at the timer, we're at 10 minutes.

9:24Is this was the first conference for the new general manager, not CEO, Mark.

9:29And I think there's a pretty tough gig, right?

9:3255 days in, pretty challenging circumstances to be in.

9:36You're at the helm of a company that's supposed to be an incumbent, one of the biggest incumbents in the industry, and you've not really had a chance to sort of make your mark.

9:45So he used the keynote to introduce himself, establish himself amongst the community.

9:50And this show, not tell, like framing, was very clearly coming from him.

9:57This has never happened before.

9:58Many of the executives on the stage were the same executives the previous years.

10:01That has not changed, but this vibe was different.

10:05And I at least respect the courage, the conviction to stick with that direction and go with it and only show what has been built.

10:13Okay.

10:13So that to me was pretty important.

10:15Now, the last thing I'll finish on is some observations, right?

10:19Devs on stage to me was super interesting.

10:22If you've read my newsletter from a while back where I split this story into two, part one, I talked about the Tableau ecosystem and its direction.

10:31Part two, I talked about where it should be going and how it should be looking at the industry.

10:35In one of those uh posts, I talked about this trend that concerned me.

10:41And it was simply this.

10:43If I summarize it, I simply said something along the lines of look, when you lack vision, you look to the places where you are rich with ideas.

10:52And in this case, it's the ideas forum.

10:54Stuff we've asked for for many, many years.

10:56But in the newsletter, I made the argument that those features never made the cut because fundamentally there was always something better, something more innovative around the corner.

11:05And that's what Tableau prioritized over these features.

11:08And what Devs on Stage to me felt like was the biggest quality of life like gorge that I've ever seen.

11:19So many things that I think we've asked for for a long time.

11:22But I just worry that these are incremental updates to a paradigm that's going away.

11:28And the best example of this was the labs section at the end.

11:33You see, there was a there was a competition between three different products.

11:37And you know, the whole conference would be talking about AI.

11:40But yet the feature that won had nothing really to do with AI.

11:45Yes, it maybe had a machine learning model in the background, but it was actually a capability that squarely showed that the direction that competitors have is actually the right one.

11:57It was essentially an app.

11:58It was a parameterized app.

12:00Yes, Tableau will call it parameters, but a parameter is just a form field, it's just an application field, right?

12:05And you slid one thing here and it did something uh elsewhere.

12:10That's what won.

12:11That was what got the most excitement.

12:14That is juxtaposed to the whole framing of the entire conference around agentic analytics.

12:19That was not agentic.

12:20That was squarely almost data science, machine learning, and apps in one thing.

12:26Now, if you've watched my previous videos about hex, if you watch some of the videos I already have on the channel on Sigma, some of the videos I have in the future about Sigma, if you watch some of the videos I have about Golden Analytics, there's already a video on that.

12:40Um, Ridge AI, which I'll cover in the coming week, uh, and many other videos that I'll do in the near term.

12:47All of these companies already have a shipping capability in this space today.

12:54Whilst in Tableau, it's a labs on devs on stage.

12:58And if we know anything about labs, we don't always get those features shipped.

13:03So for me, and this is where I sort of switch into opinion, and I don't expect you to agree with me.

13:10My biggest concern was that even if you take the best capabilities from the conference, in the last five years, Tableau has not shown that it can ship these features quickly.

13:23Composable data sources, one of the biggest things celebrated at this conference, without a shadow of the doubt, it's going to create shockwaves in the Tableau ecosystem.

13:32It is one of the biggest innovations, and we saw it at this conference.

13:35But I'll remind you, Tableau were talking about this in 2024, and it's taken two years to get to this point to actually ship the feature.

13:43It's still not shipped, it might be in the next beta, we don't know, but it looks like it's about to ship.

13:47My good friend Kirk will have plenty of good content on this.

13:50Stay tuned.

13:51I'm gonna get him on the channel to talk about it.

13:54But I still cannot ignore that it took.

13:57We are at two years now, and it still has not shipped.

14:01And so I really worry about Tableau's ability to ship features fast, to keep up with the monthly cadence that its competitors are keeping up with.

14:10Hex, Sigma, Omni, all these competitors, Golden have built in my mind the majority of the idealized experience you want with AI in a fraction of the time.

14:22And that's not just Hyperball.

14:24I know this because I see it.

14:25I've actually got access to it and I'm playing around with it.

14:28And it's super interesting.

14:29Like I cannot believe how much, not just Golden, but many other platforms are closing the gap.

14:36The pace at which they're closing the gap to Tableau is relentless to the point where they can also execute on ideas faster because they do not have the burden of heritage.

14:48And so if I'm Mark Reach and I'm thinking, hey, I'm 55 days into the job, what do I do?

14:53Where do I go?

14:55I I've I've I've run this thought experiment.

14:58Actually, I messaged a few people and I said, hey, if you were the CEO of Tableau and you've just started, what would be the first three things you would do?

15:05It's an incredibly hard challenge.

15:07I'd love to know what you think in the comments.

15:09But to me, I think if I drill into everything that I thought about this question, I have to very quickly understand that if I want to stay competitive, if we want to keep Tableau in its sort of prime position, I have to figure out what innovation I'm going to bring into the Tableau ecosystem that will essentially cannibalize my existing business, completely fundamentally disrupt it.

15:37Because if I don't disrupt my own business, everyone else will.

15:40That's pretty much what's happening right now.

15:42That is the single biggest challenges.

15:44Now, the steps you take to do that, I don't know.

15:46I don't work in Salesforce, I don't know all the details, and I absolutely don't know what the revenue numbers look like.

15:52Salesforce and Tableau could be in a position where they could just do a very easy, you know, coast for the next five years and still be a very successful, profitable company.

16:02It's a well-oiled machine, it's very successful.

16:04And it still does the job, frankly, for many analysts.

16:07It really, really does.

16:08But the paradigm is shifting, the perspectives are changing, and people are looking to different types of solutions.

16:16I'm not sold on the agency angle.

16:18Yes, that's a framing, but I'm not sold on how we've seen that presented.

16:23The command center, I didn't buy it.

16:25Some of the other capabilities around being able to see how the agents are performing.

16:29I didn't buy that either.

16:31The metadata kind of minority report, like look into that.

16:37That's just a really fancy hackathon on top of the metadata API.

16:42I think that was actually very easy to build.

16:44Maybe I'm making it up.

16:46If you're a tableau in Salesforce, you want to put me right?

16:48Let me know.

16:49I'm on Slack.

16:50But nonetheless, I wasn't impressed by that.

16:53If I really wanted some of that benefit today, I could already do it with APIs.

16:57I can go into Claude code in five minutes and build something far more precise for my specific use case than that feature can do for everyone in a generalized context.

17:09It's already possible.

17:10Tableau has one of the most extensive API landscapes of any BI platform.

17:17That it should be an advantage, but it's also a massive Achilles Hill.

17:21Because if I'm Sigma, if I'm all of these other platforms, I look at that and I think data portability.

17:27I can get anything I want out of the Tableau ecosystem into my platform.

17:31And frankly, that's the biggest challenge.

17:34When MCPs are everywhere, there are no more wall gardens.

17:38Anyway, that's my perspective on Tableau Conference.

17:41I'd love to know what you think in the comments.

17:42This is pretty much going to be the only video I do on this.

17:45The rest of the videos, I'll just be breaking down the things I got excited about at conference.

17:49And I'm going to be pushing on with new tools on this channel.

17:53We're just getting started.

17:54It's been really good to take a break, by the way.

17:56It was really nice just to step away from stuff.

17:58Just make some videos that have nothing to do with Tableau and just you know open my mind to some of the other tools and perspectives.

18:04If you're from one of those companies or partners that have reached out to me to say, hey, we'd love to work with you, I am so appreciative.

18:11It's a huge, huge um, you know, vote of confidence in many ways that uh you're sort of excited to work with me.

18:18So yeah, I'm excited to keep that relationship going, and yeah, we'll see where we end up at the end of the year for uh everyone else who's watching this channel.

18:26Thanks for watching.

18:26I'll see you in the next one.