Tableau update uses AI to increase speed to insight

Tableau was acquired by Salesforce earlier this year for $15.7 billion, but long before that, the company had been working on its Fall update, and today it announced several new tools including a new feature called 'Explain Data' that uses AI to get to insight quickly.

"What Explain Data does is it moves users from understanding what happened to why it might have happened by automatically uncovering and explaining what's going on in your data. So what we've done is we've embedded a sophisticated statistical engine in Tableau, that when launched automatically analyzes all the data on behalf of the user, and brings up possible explanations of the most relevant factors that are driving a particular data point," Tableau chief product officer, Francois Ajenstat explained.

He added that what this really means is that it saves users time by automatically doing the analysis for them, and It should help them do better analysis by removing biases and helping them dive deep into the data in an automated fashion.

Image: Tableau

Ajenstat says this is a major improvement in that previously users would have do all of this work manually. "So a human would have to go through every possible combination, and people would find incredible insights, but it was manually driven. Now with this engine, they are able to essentially drive automation to find those insights automatically for the users," he said.

He says this has two major advantages. First of all, because it's AI-driven it can deliver meaningful insight much faster, but it also it gives a more of a rigorous perspective of the data.

In addition, the company announced a new Catalog feature, which provides data bread crumbs with the source of the data, so users can know where the data came from, and whether it's relevant or trustworthy.

Finally, the company announced a new server management tool that helps companies with broad Tableau deployment across a large organization to manage those deployments in a more centralized way.

All of these features are available starting today for Tableau customers.

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