Rethinking Analytics for the Agentic Enterprise

In the rush to integrate large language models (LLMs) into enterprise workflows, the term “agentic analytics” is too often misunderstood as just another conversational UI layered onto business data. But true agentic analytics is not just about chatting with charts—it’s about delivering the right insight to the right user at the right moment where they work, so they can take timely, meaningful action.

It’s also about scaling that ability across the entire organization. That means breaking through data silos, departmental boundaries, and the disconnected logic of legacy tools. And to do that effectively, organizations need more than AI. They need a deeply unified platform: one that combines a harmonized data foundation, semantic context, visual and textual insights, and an action framework, all coordinated through a transparent agentic architecture.

Let’s explore the transition from today’s fragmented analytics reality to a unified agentic future, and why Tableau Next is the only platform purpose-built for this new era.

The fragmented state of today’s enterprise applications

Today’s enterprise applications are siloed, with business logic, data, and metadata locked in bespoke, proprietary platforms. Real-time visibility across departments is more of a promise than a reality. Operational insights are lagging indicators, pulled from disconnected systems, loaded into centralized data platforms, and visualized in dashboards that rarely connect to action.

While these systems serve specific departments—Finance, HR, Sales—they lack the orchestration to drive true end-to-end automation or insight delivery at the speed the business needs. The result? Enterprises are data-rich but insight-poor; and even business users who are somewhat insight-rich and definitely action-poor.

Attempts to stitch systems together with APIs, message buses, or microservices often fail because they translate between fundamentally different languages and break under complexity. We’re stuck with islands of automation and fragmented analytics. But a fundamental transformation is underway. We're moving from siloed, reactive analytics to intelligent agentic systems, AI-powered agents that collaborate with humans and other agents to drive outcomes aligned with business KPIs.

The future of enterprise apps and why agentic analytics matters

In an agentic enterprise, agents are not just automating tasks. They understand goals, interpret changes, suggest responses, and learn from human guidance. They're measured by the same metrics that appear in dashboards today: revenue growth, customer satisfaction, margin improvement, and more.

And here's the key: every agent needs analytics capabilities, to observe, reason, and act. They must work across systems, understand semantics, and communicate in human-friendly ways. That’s what agentic analytics enables and why Tableau Next is foundational.

This future isn’t a rip-and-replace. It’s an evolution; one where analytics becomes the connective tissue across every business function and every intelligent agent.

What you need for agentic analytics and why Tableau Next leads

To build toward this future, organizations need more than AI models. They need a platform that unifies insight generation and decision making. There are the five critical capabilities that Tableau Next uniquely delivers:

1. Open data layer: The foundation for cross-system intelligence

Agentic systems demand a unified, trusted foundation of data. Tableau Next, powered by Salesforce Data Cloud, seamlessly harmonizes data across all sources—cloud, on-premises, structured, and unstructured—into a secure, governed, and queryable layer. Importantly, this foundation doesn’t require physically moving data. Instead, it uses zero-copy architecture and intelligent data orchestration to provide real-time, 360-degree access to enterprise-wide data without migration or duplication.

This unified, open data layer becomes the source of truth for every agent and employee, ensuring consistency across workflows, metrics, and decision making.

2. Harmonized semantic layer: business context that scales

Data without meaning is noise. Tableau Next includes a powerful semantic layer that aligns data to business logic, hierarchies, and metrics. This ensures that every question asked—by a human or agent—is interpreted through a shared business lens with consistent context.

By standardizing definitions and infusing deep business knowledge, insights become trustworthy, comparable, and actionable, whether seen in a dashboard, Slack message, or an agent’s recommendation.

3. Agentic framework powered by Agentforce and Tableau Next

At the core of Tableau Next is Agentforce, a purpose-built orchestration layer for agentic analytics. Unlike black-box agents, Agentforce enables transparent, explainable, and controllable agents that operate with business context and human supervision.

Crucially, the analytics capabilities every agent needs, from data preparation and exploration to generating insights and recommendations, are all powered by Tableau Next. This means every agent benefits from the full depth of Tableau Next's visual and semantic understanding, enabling them to:

• Ask and answer business questions intelligently
• Detect patterns and anomalies proactively
• Communicate insights through narrative, visual, and structured outputs
• Suggest and even initiate actions with traceability and clarity

With no-code/low-code configuration, organizations can build, customize, and monitor agents aligned to KPIs, workflows, and security standards. Agentforce makes it possible to deploy a network of agents across the enterprise, each with analytics as a core competency, while maintaining a human-in-the-loop approach to trust and accountability.

4. Visualization layer: where insight meets action

Even in an agentic world, humans remain critical. That’s why Tableau Next’s industry-leading visual analytics are essential. Insights aren’t just pushed to users, they’re explained visually, allowing for fast comprehension, verification, and decision making.

It’s not just about charts. It’s about enabling agent-to-human collaboration, where users can interact with visual evidence, approve actions, or explore further, all within a seamless experience.

5. Action framework: from insights to outcomes

The final mile of analytics is action. Tableau Next leverages the Salesforce Flow framework, enabling closed-loop action workflows from a single insight.

This turns KPIs into triggers. Agents can suggest actions, simulate outcomes, and initiate processes, all tied back to the semantic model and metric tree. From “notify me when sales drop” to “launch a discount campaign when inventory hits threshold,” the system enables large action models, not just language models.

Why Tableau Next is the first agentic analytics platform

Agentic analytics is more than LLMs with dashboards. It’s about building a continuous decision loop, where agents and humans collaborate through data, semantics, visuals, and action frameworks to drive business outcomes. This requires a unified platform, and Tableau Next is the only platform that brings all five elements together:

• Harmonized, open data layer
• Business-aligned semantic context
• Transparent agent framework
• Human-first visual insight interface
• Closed-loop action infrastructure

The age of agentic analytics has arrived and it starts with Tableau Next—learn more about the platform and see it in action.

Want to dive deeper? Watch our on-demand webinar that explains the deeply unified architecture of Tableau Next where data, metadata, workflows, apps, and AI converge.