0:00Salesforce has a new vision for Tableau.
0:02They're calling it Tableau Next.
0:03And in this video, I want to spend 10 minutes taking you through the core fundamentals.
0:08of the platform.
0:09You might also be wondering what's happening with the traditional products.
0:13Tableau desktop, Tableau Prep, Tableau Server.
0:15They're not going anywhere.
0:17They're going to be running in parallel with this new platform.
0:19So what I want to do
0:20is take you through what we know so far.
0:22Everything we're seeing is from demos and examples.
0:25And I made a much longer video that spends an hour and a half going into that detail.
0:30This video is the summary, the 10 minute summary you can share with your colleagues
0:33My name is Tim.
0:34I'm a Tableau Visionary and as I like to say on this channel, let's get stuck in.
0:38Now this new platform is built around three core philosophies.
0:41The first one, in my opinion, is the shift away from products towards experiences.
0:46What does that mean?
0:47Well in today's tableau, if you're trying to do a piece of work, you probably have a couple of bits of software open.
0:52You have Tableau Desktop
0:53You'll then have the browser open for Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud.
0:57And then additionally, if you're doing data prep before all of that, then you'll have Tableau Prep.
1:01These are all disparate products designed to do very specific things.
1:04But it makes for a very cluttered experience.
1:06You have to switch between all these experiences and it's not ideal.
1:10In the new version of Tableau, in Tableau Next
1:12Everything is under one roof in the browser.
1:14So everything is one seamless experience and you'll be switching between workspaces and different areas where you do your work, but it's all fundamentally linked.
1:23and there is no hard switch between each of these areas.
1:26The next is this focus on more assisted modes of work.
1:29Now what do I mean by assistance?
1:31Well in this new vision, the big push behind this whole entire platform is agent force.
1:36This is a Salesforce push.
1:37for agentic AI.
1:39And that's been weaved into the Tableau Next platform.
1:42And what this enables is for you to be able to use AI to complete some parts of your workflow.
1:47Now
1:47There is always this opinion that sometimes AI can do all our work, but I think this platform positions AI in a very useful way.
1:54You can either use it to do small parts of your workflow or you can use it to do large parts of your workflow.
2:00But this assistance is a recurring thread throughout the demos we've seen so far.
2:03The best example I have is obviously the semantic model.
2:06You're able to use AI to suggest the tables to link up.
2:09for your data model as you build it and it even allows you to reuse work that has been built elsewhere.
2:14The last big philosophy change is this idea of going from more static setups to more proactive setups.
2:20What do I mean by that?
2:21Well, a lot of analytical solutions today, you build a solution, you deploy it, and then you leave them there and people come and consume them and they just sit there as assets waiting to be consumed by individuals.
2:31The problem is that people have to go to them and yes we have capabilities like alerts today, but they're not really proactive.
2:38In this new vision for Tableau, Tableau is thinking about proactive ways of alerting you about changes in your data.
2:44And even giving you insight in a proactive way, giving you little nudges towards areas of your data that might need your attention.
2:51All of these put together.
2:52.
2:52form I think the basis of this platform and a lot of the product decisions that exist inside of the platform.
2:57But I will say one thing.
2:59In the demos we've seen so far, there's
3:02been a big focus on AI and hasn't been much of a showcase of how to do some of this work manually.
3:07So this could all be a ruse, it could it could just all be a little bit of a distraction to get you to focus on the genetic AI.
3:12But nonetheless, I think it's a pretty pretty strong direction that they're hinting to.
3:16Now the first question you probably have is when will it be live?
3:20When can I get my hands on it?
3:21When can I try it?
3:22Well
3:23Uh that's a bit of a tricky answer because it's being launched in phases.
3:26Some parts of it are already live today.
3:28Tableau semantics as an example is live today.
3:31The data cloud is also live today.
3:33But this is a really difficult thing to explain because when I say those things are live, they're not live in the same sense that
3:40Tableau community thinks of them.
3:42Let me explain this because this is something that I've really struggled to understand in the Salesforce ecosystem.
3:47Um Tableau and Salesforce now.
3:49tend to release features in phases and they typically have a status called a GA general availability.
3:55Now, a lot of the Tableau ecosystem has traditionally been delivered through Tableau.
4:01And since the Salesforce acquisition
4:03Some of the features inside of the Salesforce ecosystem have been rebranded with the Tableau name.
4:08So when we talk about Tableau semantics and we talk about Data Cloud,
4:11You might wonder, well, where are they in the Tableau ecosystem?
4:14And you'll go to the Tableau website and you won't find anything there.
4:17You'll actually have to look over in the Salesforce ecosystem to understand that those features are available in the Salesforce ecosystem.
4:23So when we talk about semantics
4:25that is available in the Salesforce ecosystem.
4:27When we talk about the data cloud, that is available in the Salesforce ecosystem.
4:32And in order to access all of this AI capability, you'll also need another
4:36thing which is the Tableau Plus license.
4:38So those are really the key things you need to be aware of.
4:41You'll need access in the Salesforce ecosystem.
4:44You'll also need access to the Tableau Plus license to see these features.
4:48And then if you have those two things, you'll start to be able to interact with some of the available features.
4:53Semantics and data cloud, those are available today.
4:56Later this year, we're likely to get some beta hands-on with some parts of the platform.
5:00And I think it's going to take up until 2026 to get the rest of the platform live.
5:04I'll put some dates that we've had pledged so far up on screen.
5:07but i don't want to date this video really really quickly because i know that these dates don't always stick they're not promises but just to give you some idea of scale this is when you should expect to see tableau next
5:17fully live.
5:18Now the other thing to be aware of here is that of course it's going to be running in parallel with the existing Tableau.
5:23So for most people who are using Tableau today,
5:26that really shouldn't be a big change.
5:28But if you're starting Tableau today and if you're starting a new Tableau relationship, then I think you might want to evaluate which of the two platforms to spend your time in.
5:36It's also worth probably understanding what the different versions of Tableau are going to be.
5:40So let's come up with some names for them.
5:42Obviously the new version is called Tableau Next.
5:45I was previously calling the old versions of Tableau, the the versions we have today Tableau Legacy, but I've heard an internal name for these.
5:52It's actually called Tableau Core.
5:54So you can think of this split as being Tableau Core, the Tableau you know today, and Tableau Next.
5:59the new version of Tableau.
6:01The next thing to cover are the core experiences and the canvas upon which they work on in the platform.
6:07So I'm going to break this down into experiences and then let's talk about the platform components as the other half.
6:13First up experiences.
6:15The first one is the Data Pro experience.
6:17Now, this is essentially the visualization building component of
6:22tableau next it's ideally designed for you to help prepare and visualize your data and it's persistent throughout the platform anytime you want to visualize anything
6:30you can go off and create a chart but the interesting thing about this is that each chart becomes part of a larger workspace i'll come on to workspaces soon
6:39And in essence, you can bring these charts together to form a much bigger experience.
6:43But nonetheless, you are essentially creating modular assets that you can use throughout the platform.
6:48And they obviously feed into a hierarchy that exists in your workspace.
6:52Again, I'll show you that soon.
6:53So that's the first one.
6:54Data Pro, a way to visualize your data.
6:57Concierge is slightly different.
6:58This is more like a personal assistance, sort of helping you understand your data.
7:03It's like a sidekick that's helping you process and understand what's going on
7:07in your data and it's it's a very subtle thing because there's also another one called inspector and inspector's job is essentially to go into your data and actually pull out insights
7:17be proactive about bringing them to you.
7:20And so the way they sort of show these two experiences working in tandem is super important, but they are drastically different experiences.
7:27And it makes sense as the kind of thing you have to see to understand.
7:29But I think these two are going to be potentially really powerful because for a long time in analytics, a lot of the capabilities have been very static and actually analysts have had to work very, very hard to pull out insights.
7:40And that is all time-consuming work.
7:42The problem is there's not enough analysts to build those kinds of insights really quickly.
7:45And so if this truly works as intended, then there's a really big ability here for Tableau to be able to surface insights in a way that's never really been possible before
7:54It's heavily reliant on a good semantic model.
7:56We'll come on to that later.
7:57Now the last thing to call out is analytical apps.
8:00Now earlier on we talked about Data Pro, you build out these small visualizations.
8:04Well, you can build those visualizations up into what Tableau or Salesforce is gonna call analytic apps.
8:10Now apps are essentially a little bit more of a transition from dashboards.
8:14And it's a simple idea is that look, dashboards are great, they're great for consuming information, but it's very hard to take actions.
8:20In this vision, what they're showing us is the ability not just to build an app, not just the ability to theme it and style it very, very quickly
8:27but actually to be able to tie it in to insight and actions that come off that.
8:32So it's a very sort of different framing to what we've been familiar with with dashboards inside of Table.
8:37Now I'll keep saying this again throughout this video.
8:39This is all speculation.
8:40Just based on the demos we've seen so far after conference, after we get our hands on more, we'll be able to do a lot more.
8:45Now the final thing to cover
8:47are what I would call the platform components.
8:50The first one, which is I think for the first time really, really important is the semantic model.
8:55In Tableau today, what you've had to do is build your data sources up inside of products, inside of Tableau Prep, inside of Tableau Desktop, on Tableau Server.
9:02You've had to really think of your data sets as assets that move between these experiences
9:08In the new tableau, they're focusing this whole entire vision around semantic models.
9:13This idea that your data is composed in a semantic model, set up in one place
9:18And every other asset, every other thing that in touches that data pulls from that semantic model.
9:24So in this new vision
9:26semantic models are right and center in this platform and I think they're super important.
9:30Now you might wonder well how do I find a semantic model?
9:33How do I relate it to my domain?
9:35or experience.
9:36That's where workspaces come in.
9:38Workspaces are essentially spaces that a team or a unit in a business can essentially use to collect all their assets in one place.
9:46There's a really nice hierarchy that Salesforce has been showing here.
9:50that allows you to really step up all the way from your data to semantic models to your prep flows all the way up to your visualizations and your apps at the very top.
9:58I'll put some graphics up on screen so you can see this.
10:00But this is a really cool concept to understand.
10:03And as I think Tableau show us more and more demos, we'll really start to understand the power of this workspace.
10:08Now, the thing that we haven't seen so far
10:10It's how easy it is to really be composable with these assets that sit inside of the workspaces.
10:15So when we get more detail about that, I think that will be one of the first things that I'll be trying to figure out.
10:20How dynamic, how flexible are these workspaces?
10:23And the last thing that I'm not so familiar with is of course the agent force integration.
10:26Of course, I'd leave this last because I'm not native of the Salesforce ecosystem.
10:30But if you're native of the Salesforce ecosystem
10:32This should be an important component for you because it will allow you to integrate not just the skills that we see here inside of Tableau Next, but also all the other AI agents that sit inside of the Agent Force platform.
10:44So this is the whole idea
10:45that this is being backed by the Salesforce agent for setup and the Gentik AI is going to be something that flows all the way through from Tableau, all the way through other products like Slack.
10:54Salesforce ecosystem and even going as far as messaging, as an example that they showed in the demo.
10:59So that's what I can sort of cover so far, and that's where I want to leave it because everything else is pretty much covered in more detail in my previous video.
11:06Go ahead and check that out
11:07But I wanted to keep this short and sweet so you can really have one resource that gives you all the kind of key things you need to know about the new platform as we head into conference.
11:16I'd be really keen to know your thoughts in the comments below.
11:18I know this is a pretty radical shift for Tableau and it's a pretty radical shift in general for analytics.
11:24I think Salesforce is taking a big bet here.
11:26And I said this in another video when we talked about Tableau Next and the naming.
11:30I said that look, Salesforce have to be willing to challenge 20% of its customer base to make a product that's really going to serve
11:3680% of its users.
11:37And that's going to be a really tough transition.
11:40If they get this right, this could be a really, really powerful thing.
11:43But so far, we haven't seen enough and we don't know enough about the platform to be able to make that judgment.
11:48I think conference is going to be a really big deal because I think to get there, you do have to make some accommodations for that 20% that are loving your product today.
11:58We'll see if it happens.
12:00My name is Tim.
12:01Thanks for watching.
12:01We'll see you in the next one.
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