Your Questions, Our Commitments: True to the Core at Tableau Conference 2025

Like it is for many of you, Tableau Conference is a highlight of the year for me. A chance to connect with the heart and soul of Tableau, our incredible DataFam. Your passion fuels us, your feedback guides us, and your insightful questions help us make Tableau better, every single day.

Truly, one of my favorite sessions at the conference (even if we have a few headphone hiccups!) is True to the Core, a town hall forum that allows me and our Tableau leadership team to hear directly from so many of you, our customers and community who are helping people see, understand, and act on data with Tableau. This year, I was joined by Sireesh, Trevor, Rekha, Southard, and Jill—leaders across engineering, marketing, product and customer support, all committed to listening to you and those able to attend True to the Core at TC25. 

In the spirit of trust, our #1 value, I want to share some of the key themes that emerged from our conversations—and our commitments moving forward for the future of Tableau.

1. Growing—not replacing—the product portfolio with Tableau Next

The classic Tableau you know and love—Tableau Desktop, Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server, Tableau Prep, Tableau Public—that's not going anywhere. It's the bedrock of what we do, and it's deeply ingrained in our analytics solutions. But we also recognize the exciting possibilities of this agentic era, the need to empower everyone to reach that next level of insight. That's why Tableau Next is such a critical addition to our portfolio, not a replacement.

Think of Tableau Next as an intelligent, full-stack agentic analytics experience, built for the future of enterprise analytics. It brings a modern open data layer, AI semantic layer, modular visualization layer, and integrated action layer to unlock many more use cases for Tableau.  And yes, being on the Salesforce Platform has helped us accelerate the delivery of Tableau Next with immense benefits to everyone—the scalability of Hyperforce, seamless data access through Data Cloud, and the intelligent power of Agentforce. But our commitment to innovation spans the entire Tableau product portfolio.

In fact, the majority of our development resources are dedicated to Server, Cloud, Prep, and Desktop. And as we showcased at TC25 keynote, complete interoperability across all our products is key. We want you to have the choice, flexibility and ability to leverage the strengths of each as you need. Our strategy is an "and," not an "or"—with robust roadmaps and deep investments across the entire Tableau product portfolio. 

At keynote, we shared an image on the screens: "The Tableau we all love.” And we meant it. That’s our foundation, and we’re building upon it.

2. Deepening our AI investments across all products 

The Salesforce acquisition has helped Tableau—we’ve been able to go faster, do more, and do better to help you.

As part of Salesforce, Tableau benefits from significant resources, as well as expertise in AI. This enables us to accelerate our development without losing focus on data privacy, security, and ethical considerations that are paramount to the responsible development of AI. And we aren’t slowing down—we’ll continue our rapid pace of innovation, broadening our AI capabilities and integrating AI more deeply across the Tableau platform.

Beyond Tableau Next, and underscoring Tableau's commitment to democratizing AI in analytics for everyone, we are actively exploring ways to bring AI across the Tableau product portfolio.

There are also many ways you can use AI with Tableau today. In Tableau Cloud, Tableau Agent and Pulse are used by over 40,000 Tableau fans each month. And thanks to the extensibility of Tableau Server, you can bring AI to Tableau Server. As we showed in the keynote, you can provide a conversational analytics experience with Tableau Server, VizQL Data Service, and an open-source agent framework of your choice. We’re also bringing Tableau Agent to Tableau Public later this year. And, we saw forthcoming AI capabilities during Devs on Stage.

3. Planning our roadmap and prioritizing your feedback

The IdeaExchange remains one of the major ways we review, evaluate, and prioritize feature requests. Moving Ideas from the Tableau Forums and into this platform has allowed us to offer a better experience through a modernized system with renewed engagement from our product teams, including the ability to propose merging ideas and to monitor the status of ideas you care about. Beyond sharing new ideas, the IdeaExchange is a valuable and effective channel for us to communicate our progress and perspectives on how your ideas align with our strategic initiatives. 

The decision to open up the Tableau Platform to API development through features like Viz Extensions and Analytics Pane Extensions is driven by our community's desire to customize, integrate, and extend the value for their organizations. Extensions allow for rapid innovation and integration with specialized tools and workflows. We can't build every analytical capability or custom chart type that everyone wants. However, we also recognize the need for core functionality and will carefully evaluate which features belong in our core products versus those that are better suited for Extensions.

We are also working diligently to expand our cloud infrastructure, having learned a lot from migrating Tableau Cloud to Hyperforce on Amazon Web Services. We are excited about the future of Salesforce products on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and want to bring Tableau to GCP as quickly as possible as part of our broader strategy to offer greater flexibility and choice for our customers. We hope to make Hyperforce on GCP available some time next year.

At the end of the day, the Tableau Community’s input absolutely influences our roadmap—we wouldn’t have it any other way. In the last year, we released over 130 new features that addressed more than 150 community ideas. Explore the latest release to see what else is new. 

4. Earning trust with deeper investments in releases and support

You've been clear: stable, reliable releases and robust support are paramount. You need confidence in our platform, and we've heard you.

Across Tableau, we are sharpening our focus with a renewed commitment to the fundamentals. This means a deep dive into our testing processes, rigorous quality control measures, and significant investments in the overall performance and scalability of our products. Minimizing disruptions and consistently delivering high-quality releases isn't just a goal–it's critical for the trust you place in Tableau. Earning and maintaining that trust is our priority, and this renewed focus on our engineering infrastructure is a testament to that commitment.

But our commitment doesn't stop there. We are also significantly investing in improvements to our support infrastructure. This includes enhanced training for our support staff, ensuring they have the expertise to assist you effectively. You will see faster response times, because your time is valuable. And we're bolstering our self-service resources, empowering you to find answers quickly and efficiently. Our goal is simple: to provide timely and effective support, so you get the help you need, precisely when you need it.

Looking ahead, we understand that navigating the evolving landscape of data and AI requires guidance. That's why we're providing new resources to help you optimize your investments. I'm particularly excited to announce the new Tableau Blueprint for Agentic Analytics. This resource will provide you with best practices to effectively bridge strategy, culture, and execution as we step into this new agentic era together.

Our commitment is to your success, and these investments across our product and support are a testament to that.

5. Leveraging the Salesforce ecosystem for Tableau growth 

It's truly remarkable to reflect on the evolution of Salesforce. What began as a pioneering CRM has expanded into a powerful and comprehensive platform, now encompassing an API development platform, a robust data platform, and a groundbreaking agent platform. This incredible growth has created a dynamic ecosystem, and Tableau's integration within it has been a catalyst for significant progress.

Since joining the Salesforce family, our Tableau business has tripled in size. This scale has allowed us to accelerate critical investments in our core architecture and cutting-edge AI capabilities–advancements that would have been far more challenging to achieve independently.

This powerful ecosystem also presents a wealth of learning opportunities for all of you, our valued Tableau users. We are deeply committed to empowering you on this journey with comprehensive educational resources. Trailhead remains an excellent starting point, and I encourage you to connect with your peers in the vibrant DataFam community through our new Slack workspace, as well as local Tableau User Groups and events. For those looking to deepen their understanding of the broader Salesforce Platform, the Architects blog offers invaluable insights.

We recognize that navigating the terminology and naming conventions within such a dynamic environment can sometimes be confusing, especially as things evolve. Please know that we are actively working to simplify our product names and descriptions, and we are enhancing our documentation and resources to provide greater clarity. Today, our core Tableau product portfolio includes Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud, and the exciting Tableau Next— often brought together as Tableau+ and alongside Tableau Public, our free platform to explore, create, and publicly share data visualizations online.

More to come, DataFam

I am grateful for the opportunities like True to the Core and Tableau Conference to connect, listen, and learn from you. Continue to share your feedback and feature requests in the IdeaExchange so we can keep iterating and building an even better Tableau. 

This is a transformational year, and as we continue on this journey, you have my commitment that I will share updates with you regularly along the way. Thank you, DataFam!