**London**: Salesforce unveils Tableau Next, the world’s first agentic analytics platform designed to enhance data reliability and accelerate insights through AI-powered agents, addressing declining trust in organisational data and bridging gaps between business priorities and analytics workflows.
Salesforce has introduced Tableau Next, a groundbreaking analytics platform described as the world’s first “agentic analytics” solution, designed to revolutionise how businesses harness artificial intelligence (AI) to derive value from their data. The announcement comes amid increasing concern among business leaders about the reliability of their data, even as the demand for rapid, data-driven decision-making intensifies.
The launch follows Salesforce’s recent survey of over 500 US business executives, which revealed a pronounced trust deficit in organisational data. According to the findings, 76% of respondents report heightened pressure to substantiate their decisions with data. However, confidence in data reliability has dropped sharply from 54% in 2023 to just 40% in 2025. Furthermore, only 49% of business leaders have direct support from data analysts, despite 85% requiring insights within 30 minutes. This gap is exacerbated by the fact that more than half of professionals struggle to independently analyse and interpret data, although 86% acknowledge that data literacy is crucial for career advancement.
The survey also highlights misalignment between data strategies and business priorities, with fewer than half of executives stating that their data approaches are fully aligned with business objectives—a decline of 14 percentage points from the previous year. These findings underscore the challenging environment in which leaders must operate, striving to make timely, trustworthy decisions in data-driven workplaces where confidence and capability lag behind increasing expectations.
Against this backdrop, Tableau Next introduces agentic analytics, a fundamental evolution beyond traditional business intelligence (BI). Southard Jones, Chief Product Officer at Tableau, explained, “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.” This shift moves analytics from a reactive process that requires users to pose questions, to a proactive system where AI agents interpret and surface insights independently.
Tableau Next features three AI-powered agents, each designed to address distinct stages of the analytics workflow:
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Data Pro: Automates the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) of raw data into business language, reducing the traditionally labour-intensive preparation process.
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Concierge: Provides a natural language interface that allows business users to pose questions in everyday language and receive visualisations and recommendations instantly.
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Inspector: Continuously monitors data streams to identify patterns and surface insights that might otherwise be overlooked by human analysts.
Jones highlighted a common limitation of prior analytics tools: “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.”
The platform is architected on four integrated layers. At its base is an open data platform supporting structured, unstructured, and streaming data. Above this foundation is an AI-powered semantic layer that translates raw data into business-relevant terms. The visualisation layer then facilitates the portability of insights across different applications, with a workflow engine linking these insights directly to business actions.
Early adopters, such as Box, have already begun leveraging Tableau technologies. Robbie Malik, Global CIO at Box, spoke of the critical role of rapid insights within the security domain: “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.”
Both Jones and Malik stressed that AI agents are not intended to replace data analysts but to transform and augment their roles. Jones remarked, “We might need more of them now. They might spend a lot less time doing admin tasks and more time doing valuable tasks.” Malik added, “This isn’t about replacing people wholesale. This is about replacing activities that they do today.”
Tableau Next is currently available through the Tableau+ SKU. The Tableau Semantics layer is accessible immediately, while the Concierge and Data Pro agents are slated for general release in June 2025. The Inspector agent, which offers continuous data monitoring and insight generation, will follow later in the year.
This launch addresses the paradox faced by modern businesses: data volumes are growing exponentially while trust in that data diminishes. By removing technical barriers and automating insight generation, Tableau Next aims to enhance data confidence and actionable intelligence within organisations.
With Tableau Next, Salesforce integrates Tableau’s strong visualisation capabilities with its own AI expertise, embedding analytics within workflows and applications already familiar to users. The platform promises to accelerate data utilisation by reducing friction between insight discovery and decision-making processes, signalling a significant evolution in enterprise analytics.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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