Tableau Showcases Agentic Analytics, Tableau Next at Gartner BI Bake-Off

Each year, leading business intelligence platforms go head-to-head at the Gartner Analytics and BI Bake-Off. The challenge: solve real-world data problems before a live audience at the annual Data & Analytics Summit. In this competition, vendors must prove their ability to transform raw data into meaningful insights. This year, Tableau set a new standard for AI-powered decision-making.

In an era where AI is rapidly changing every facet of our lives, especially the workforce, we ask: What does that transformation really look like? At Tableau, we believe that it's personal and fundamentally human. Organizations want smarter, faster ways to convert data into actionable insights, from dashboards to much more. Tableau has delivered! We guided the audience through a powerful, human-centered approach to AI and analytics, demonstrating how businesses can transition from static reporting to a new era of dynamic, intelligent decision-making.

Data Management: Less Prep, More Insights

Tableau simplifies the data management process, making it easier for people to access and prepare data. Tableau Agent and Data Cloud enable businesses to manage data efficiently, eliminating manual tasks and reducing errors that slow decision-making. We showed how with conversational analytics, Tableau Agent provides recommendations, quickly delivers requested results, and even offers options for new calculations. Data Cloud, the data layer that unifies structured and unstructured data, offers a graph view of all the raw data and an easy way to map it for accuracy with just one tap. So instead of spending time wrangling data, teams can focus on solving business problems with trusted, well-structured information, even when the source data is messy.

AI as an Assistant, Not a Replacement

Tableau Agent acts as an assistant—not a replacement–for human expertise. With help from Explain Data in the Data Guide, people can quickly understand trends and patterns without guessing what their data means. Tableau Pulse aids in identifying key drivers in data, so organizations can easily spot emerging trends early and respond proactively, rather than reacting too late. With Discover, conversational analytics enables you to talk with all available data across multiple metrics and find the right answers fast.

Bringing Data to Where Decisions Happen

Finding insights is only the first step; acting on them is what truly drives impact. Tableau showcased how businesses can integrate data into everyday decision-making wherever teams already work. Furthermore, analytical apps and dashboards can be embedded directly into workflows and applications, like CRM, ERP, and other business software, making insights actionable in the context of daily work. These integrations ensure that critical information, like metrics that can be shared live, reaches the right people at the right time. Whether it’s helping a sales team track performance or guiding customer service managers toward better resolutions, Tableau equips everyone to move quickly from insight to action.

Uncovering the ‘Why’ Behind Data

One of the most exciting moments of the event was in the “Cool Innovation” section, where Tableau introduced the Pulse Research Agent, which helps businesses not only understand what’s happening in their data but also why it’s happening. Instead of just identifying trends, Tableau helps diagnose and uncover underlying causes, so organizations can address challenges before they become bigger problems. We demonstrated how a multi-agent approach can explore and deeply investigate the evidence for an insight, pulling from multiple sources like macro trends, external research, social media posts, and internal data. With results that provide actionable insights with context from your business data, you can ask the agent to draft strategies for action or summarize relevant information for senior leadership. This happens because Pulse brings conversational AI to all your metrics, drawing data from many sources to deliver the figures you most want to track.

At a Glance

The Gartner Analytics and BI Bake-Off is a proving ground for analytics platforms, and this year’s event reinforced Tableau’s leadership in agentic analytics. Businesses need technology that helps them ask better questions of their data, make informed decisions, and take meaningful action. That’s exactly what Tableau delivers. As AI continues to shape the future of analytics and business intelligence, Tableau remains focused on helping everyone see, understand, and act on their data, anytime and anywhere. 

Learn more about analytics and business intelligence, explore the latest features and what’s coming next in Tableau from Salesforce, and learn about more innovations at Tableau Conference.