Tableau Conference 2024 (TC24) offered insights into the evolving vision and direction of Tableau, especially in the context of AI advancements and the growing complexity of enterprise data management. As we prepare for Tableau Conference 2025 this week (April 15-17, San Diego), let’s revisit what we observed at TC24, examine what’s progressed since, and examine our expectations moving forward.

TC24 Key Announcements and Progress-to-Date

At TC24, Tableau highlighted several ambitious initiatives:

• The Fourth Wave of Analytics: Emphasizing trust, streamlined insights delivery, and integrated workflows.
• Composable Platform Vision: Introducing flexibility through “bring your own” (BYO) data lakes, semantic layers, and large language models (LLMs).
• Proactive Intelligence: Tableau Pulse and agentic workflows designed to bring analytics directly into users’ daily tasks, minimizing reliance solely on traditional dashboards.

In reviewing these initiatives a year later, we’ve seen progress, albeit gradual:

• Tableau Pulse has begun to see practical use, mostly within targeted use cases.
• Semantic models, while promising, still often require additional tooling and maturity to achieve widespread effectiveness.
• Adoption of these advanced capabilities at scale remains a work-in-progress for most organizations.

Most large organizations will also experience a sizable delay in their ability to work with these tools on-premises, as the upgrade cycle of large enterprise systems can be slow.

Observations and Open Questions

Salesforce and Tableau have presented a vision to emphasize innovation, and user-friendly experiences. But some questions remain:
How will Tableau ensure consistency and stability amidst an evolving product suite, product naming conventions, and shifting architectural stacks?

Given this recent restructuring, can Tableau maintain its previous momentum of innovation combined with product quality?

Exploring Tableau Next: The Shift from Product to Experience

Tableau Next represents a big shift toward user-centered analytics experiences. It features four primary agent-driven capabilities:

• Data Pro: Simplifies data preparation and visualization.
• Concierge: Offers conversational analytics to help users quickly understand complex data.
• Inspector: Provides real-time monitoring and alerts on data trends and anomalies.
• Analytic App Builder: Enables customized, interactive analytics apps tailored to unique business needs.

While these new tools promise an enhanced usability and user engagement, augmented by agents and AI, they will also depend very heavily on robust and reliable data modeling. Achieving the full potential of these agents will require a continued focus from the customer on constructing accurate, comprehensive, and certified data models and semantic layers.

Areas of Opportunity for TC25

We at Action are particularly curious around several areas of potential clarification and development from Tableau Conference 2025:

• Feature Transparency: Clear updates on the availability and readiness of announced features.
• Platform Alignment: Understanding how Tableau plans to harmonize Tableau Core and Tableau Next—whether integrated or parallel paths.
• Semantic Layer and Data Governance: Increased visibility into how semantic models will be developed, maintained, and certified.
• Data Visualization: The preservation and advancement of Tableau’s legacy as a leader in sophisticated visual storytelling, enhanced by AI-driven analytics.
• Real-World Use Cases: Practical demonstrations from organizations actively using Tableau Pulse and agent-driven features.

Looking Forward with Curiosity

TC25 represents an important moment, an inflection point, not only for Tableau and Salesforce but also for the broader analytics community. The choices made now around architecture, integration, and technology will shape the future of analytics for years to come. This is not merely a question of feature selection; it’s a point of strategic commitment to the values of transparency, reliability, and trust.

As we approach this year’s conference from a place of Action, we’re eager to see where Tableau is headed. We recognize there are challenges, and we also see significant potential for meaningful, user-focused innovation.

Join Us at Tableau Conference 2025

Keith Helfrich, Jonathan Drummey, Shaun Davis, Johanna Villa, Jeremy Paytas, Josh Greenwalt, and Autumn Kloth from Action will be at TC25. We invite you to connect and share your experiences. Together, let’s explore together how Tableau can best serve the analytics community.

What do you hope to see at TC25? How could Tableau’s upcoming features and enhancements further support your organization’s success?
We look forward to seeing you there and talking about it!

Where The TC25 Action Comes Together

Don’t miss the full story — explore all our complete conference coverage via this blog feed: Tableau Conference 2025 | Full Coverage.