Tableau President and CEO Ryan Aytay said the company's future as part of the Salesforce product portfolio is to leverage generative AI in the future to offer "precision decisions" and a semantic layer that can democratize analytics and enable data sharing.
Aytay's appearance on DisrupTV was a month after Tableau's user conference. The company announced extensibility and usability feature and free local file sharing in Tableau Desktop Public. Tableau also announced Einstein Copilot for Tableau in beta, Tableau Pulse, which connects KPIs and insights, and Tableau+, a package for customers that want to provide access across an enterprise.
Tableau also launched more than a dozen new features that were showcased at the conference.
Tableau and Salesforce Eye Next Wave of Analytics and BI | Analytics and Business Intelligence Trends in Cloud, Embedding, and Generative AI
Before becoming CEO at Tableau, Aytay was the company's Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) for more than a year. Prior to Tableau he was Salesforce's Chief Business Officer. Here are some of the key takeaways from Aytay's DisrupTV chat.
The transition to Tableau CEO. Aytay's position as Tableau's revenue chief gave him a lot of opportunities to "learn the business and learn our customers." Aytay said the CRO role requires you to listen to customers and partners and see what's working and not and how to improve the experience.
"One of the key things for any role you start is that you have to be aware of what's happening and not just assume you know the answer because often you only know your own perspective," said Aytay.
Working with Tableau's community. One of the more unique things about Tableau is that it has a strong community of more than 4 million members. That tally has doubled since Salesforce acquired Tableau in 2019. "The community is a really big part of the business and an opportunity for customers and partners to learn from each other," said Aytay. "The community helped to bring training materials to learn and transition into the world of self-service analytics. Now we're into this core personalization and consumerization which is all about AI. The community is helping people move in that direction. It's a support system and ecosystem. My job is to really listen to them."
Aytay said he met with 30 customers in June to talk shop and everyone has been experimenting and trying to figure out the role of the digital worker. "I think we're still in the mode of the human interacting with a kind of digital worker," he explained. "In the longer term, the digital worker will become better and there will be a partnership with the technology."
Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen said in a recent research note:
"Given that some 70% percent of Tableau customers do not use other Salesforce products, Tableau execs struck all the right chords to reestablish the importance of the brand and the DataFam, and to reinforce Tableau’s differentiation as a best-of-bread analytics and BI market leader. At the same time, they also acknowledged that Salesforce, with its deep pockets, its huge ecosystem, and its bevy of existing tech assets, will be indispensable and inseparable in helping Tableau to evolve."
Community and product development. Aytay said Tableau's product development is heavily influenced by the community because it "is the most in tune with what's happening."
"What's happening and what product requirements do we need to be thinking about. The community is like this heartbeat, and we need to do a lot for them, and they do a lot for us. It's a partnership. The best products have a strong community.
One of the best parts of my job is that I get to talk to the community members. I can tell you that we get a lot of feedback and that we need to change things. We're already talking to them about what's coming to give us feedback. They give us a bunch of feedback, and we try to make adjustments to things we don't always get right. You just have to be authentic and walk into these situations and talk about listening. Once you receive information you have to act on it."
Generative AI and safety. Aytay said generative AI has gone a long way to consumerizing AI, but it's still uncertain how it applies to the enterprise. "What's great about generative AI is that it has a lot of momentum. In a business or enterprise, you need to make sure you have a big data strategy to make sure you're not sending your company information into the open Internet," he said. "That's the journey and we can go with our community to teach businesses, organizations and nonprofits to be careful. I think we're in a learning environment right now."
GenAI and Tableau. Aytay said:
"First of all, we have to deliver what customers need right now. We've delivered products to the market that are useful. We have Einstein Copilot for Tableau, and it has been rapidly adopted.
But as we look to the next wave, the future of Tableau is really about going beyond seeing and understanding your data and that standard intelligence experience."
Aytay said companies have multiple data silos and your data has to support multiple people and roles. What's needed is a semantic layer that will bring all the data together a unifying it. That's a key part of Tableau's new products.
Marketplaces and sharing will also be a big part of the product roadmap. Aytay said:
"If there's a great visualization, data, data prep, data calculation or semantic model I should be able to share it in my four walls of the business and externally. That sharing is a radical change that is being built natively with AI."
Precision decisions. Aytay said that enterprises should be able to ask questions of the business in the flow of work in real time. The vision of analytics has been about actually making decisions in business.
"It's not just about looking at dashboards," said Aytay. "How do I make the best decision possible leveraging all the data in my business?"
