The 2024 Tableau Conference has wrapped up! Each year, Tableau (a Salesforce company) holds a 3-day conference to bring together the massive Tableau community and unveil their latest and greatest features for business analytics and data visualization. Being a Tableau shop since 2012, Harmelin Media has taken the opportunity to attend the Tableau conference over the years to keep a pulse on best practices and learn a few tips and tricks along the way.
This year, pulse was not just a metaphor – it was a headlining product at the conference. Part of the growing list of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered Tableau tools, Tableau Pulse is an intriguing concept. Pulse is designed to deliver short, summary-level information (data, charts, insights) to a user through embedded, email, or mobile deployments. In simple terms, Tableau Pulse is aimed at bringing Executive Summary information to the forefront, leaving the dense dashboards and complex data tables to the Business Analysts.
At the core of Tableau Pulse is Einstein — Salesforce’s AI brand. Salesforce Einstein has been part of their ecosystem since 2016. Initially focused on the Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) suite, the Einstein brand has permeated the larger Salesforce product portfolio since its introduction. With Tableau, Einstein is a rebranding of the long-existing statistical natural language tool called Narrative Science, which Salesforce acquired in late 2021. Much of the functionality within Tableau Einstein is familiar to us because Harmelin Media has experimented with Narrative Science implementations since 2016. That said, Tableau Pulse is the best packaging we have seen for the natural language feature, so we are excited to get our hands on it.
Tableau Pulse and the other AI features in Einstein are not currently available to us. To use them, we – like all other Tableau customers – need to move to Tableau Cloud. Tableau Cloud is a simpler Tableau Server environment hosted by Tableau. Harmelin currently manages an array of servers (hosted in Microsoft Azure) to power our Tableau environment. When we move to Tableau Cloud, we will have all the benefits of Tableau Server, including Pulse and Einstein, while not having to manage uptime and server resources. Other benefits include more frequent updates and newer features, which allows our Reporting & Analytics team to provide better, more innovative insights. Harmelin’s move to Tableau Cloud is scheduled for Q4 2024.
The 2024 Tableau Conference echoed much of the technology landscape over the past 12-18 months, putting all its emphasis on the benefits of Artificial Intelligence and how its use with data can improve insights and beef up analysis. With our incredible data-gathering tools and knowledge of industry trends, Harmelin Media is in a prime position to take advantage of the latest and greatest from Tableau.
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