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There are many different things a business user can do with a business intelligence and data analysis tool such as Painting. Often the biggest challenge isn’t having more features, but rather having users stare at a blank page and not knowing what to do.
This is the challenge Selling power is looking to solve this problem with the launch of Einstein Copilot for Tableau, which enters beta today. The new AI tool for Tableau is an extension of Salesforce’s broader portfolio efforts with Copilot Einstein, which brings a set of generative AI capabilities to Salesforce applications. Einstein Copilot was made available to Salesforce CRM users in public beta last month, providing users with a conversational assistant to facilitate workflows.
Einstein Copilot for Tableau is purpose-built for data analysis and isn’t just about asking natural language queries on data. The new Copilot incorporates a series of features to help business users and data analysts overcome the dreaded “blank page” situation, where they don’t know exactly what to do next or how to perform a certain operation. Einstein Copilot for Tableau includes recommended questions to help users know what can be asked about a particular dataset. There is also conversational data mining capability to help users dig deeper into results.
Basically, it’s about providing business users with a tool to accelerate data understanding, without having to first learn how to become a fast engineer.
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The AI Impact Tour – Atlanta
Continuing our tour, we head to Atlanta for the AI Impact Tour stop on April 10th. This exclusive, invitation-only event, in partnership with Microsoft, will feature discussions on how generative AI is transforming the security workforce. Places are limited, so request an invitation today.
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“We don’t want to say to the user: You need to write better prompts,” Southard Jones, chief product officer at Tableau, told VentureBeat. “So we spent a lot of energy and time making sure that when an analyst is in the traditional Tableau experience of tablets and shelves and they ask questions, they can get answers or we guides us towards very specific answers.
In Tableau, a pill refers to the types of data a user fits into a workflow, while shelves refer to the columns and rows of data being analyzed.
Einstein Copilot goes beyond Tableau Pulse
Integrating AI-powered tools into Tableau is nothing new.
In February this year, Tableau launched its AI-powered Pulse tool, which helps users surface insights from data and create data visualizations. Even before that, Tableau had multiple iterations of tools that also enabled varying degrees of natural language queries and AI-driven insights.
Where Einstein Copilot for Tableau is different is in its purpose as a true assistant to help users with data analysis and exploration.
“It’s actually going to recommend things to you,” Southard said. “This will help you build your analysis and do your analysis, which will make people comfortable using the interface.”
The interface is also feedback-driven, allowing users to identify whether recommendations were helpful or if more are needed. Southard pointed out that several user studies conducted by Tableau have found that people are more likely to use a feature if there is an easy way to submit feedback about it.
Creating guided calculations helps prepare data for analysis
In addition to data mining, Tableau also has data preparation capabilities as part of the core platform.
One of the most difficult tasks for a new data analyst is often knowing how to create data calculations, an area where Einstein Copilot for Tableau can now help.
“When you prepare data for analysis, you often do things like add columns or create a calculation,” Southard said. “To create a calculation in Tableau, like any other tool, sometimes you need to know a language and that can be difficult to learn. So we now allow you to write in human language and we will transform it into machine language. »
Writing an email with AI generation is not the same as doing data analysis
While Salesforce has already deployed Einstein Copilot for CRM and uses the same foundation to enable Tableau functionality, Southard emphasized that it was trained and optimized for a specific use case.
With Salesforce CRM, the context of the data is understood because all data is already stored and collected in Salesforce. With Tableau, the context in which the data is going to be used is not just for CRM, it can be used for any type of data analysis.
“LLMs can do amazing things, but to get the prompt needed to return a good answer and interact positively with it, you need to know the use case well,” he said. “Writing an email is very different from having a service call conversation and is very different from asking a question about random data.”
