This week, Salesforce announced a new AI visual analytics platform, Tableau Einstein, to help scale and enhance data-driven workflows.
The move comes as Salesforce continues to build a CRM platform with various integrated solutions to improve customer-facing business procedures. Tableau’s platform notably incorporates multiple parts of the Salesforce portfolio, including integration with Agentforce and its privacy infrastructure.
Tableau Einstein allows data experts and analysts to create semantic models based on real-time customer data. It also has a dedicated marketplace where professionals can share their analytical assets within a business.
Moreover, Tableau’s integrated marketplace and APIs further facilitate internal collaboration by enabling different team members to work across different data assets, such as sources, models, visualizations, and dashboards, in a streamlined drag-and-drop workspace.
“We’re in the midst of an autonomous revolution that’s changing the way businesses use data for competitive, customer, and employee experiences,” remarked Ryan Aytay, the CEO of Tableau.
According to Salesforce, the new AI solution comes as the enterprise demands it. The firm reports that roughly 94 per cent of business leaders strive for greater value from their company data.
Salesforce is distributing some Tableau Einstein services via the Tableau+ platform. However, the full standalone product and a Salesforce-integrated version will arrive in the future.
Tableau Einstein: Under the Hood
The Tableau Einstein solution incorporates a vast technology stack to enhance modern data pipelines, such as AI, autonomous digital agents, and cloud services.
Aytay explained:
By using high-performance AI to bring together data and action with humans, autonomous and assistive agents represent the new paradigm for business efficiency and will future-proof the data and analytics foundation you are already using. You no longer have to dig across data silos or be a data specialist to get the information to be successful in your role; data and insights are for everyone.
Salesforce integrates autonomous and assistive agents via Tableau’s Agent and Pulse services, providing the AI framework for helping agents identify mission-critical metrics and distribute those metrics to other applications such as Slack, email, and Salesforce clouds.
Salesforce integrated Tableau’s Pulse directly into its flagship CRM system in August. The Pulse integration introduced a new service version that provides pre-built metrics and AI-powered insights directly within Salesforce CRM, starting with Sales Cloud. The solution is built on Salesforce’s Einstein Platform and uses generative AI to bring intelligence into CRM users’ daily workflows.
Furthermore, Tableau Semantics is another freshly integrated service within the Einstein platform. It optimizes a company’s AI-generated data and agents with custom business context. This allows a company to tailor its AI integrations based on business intelligence data, including personalized goals and metrics.
Moreover, the Tableau Einstein solution leverages Salesforce’s Data Cloud platform to manage and reuse data for future workflows.
Big Announcements from Salesforce Dreamforce 2024
Earlier this week, Salesforce hosted its Dreamsforce 2024 event, during which the CRM giant continued highlighting its growth as a platform provider with various rapidly growing software, including Salesforce, Slack, and Tableau.
The event showcased various key announcements, highlighting an impressive month of growth for Salesforce across the board, such as the recent move from a suite to a platform solution. Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, stated, ” This platform, which we’re all familiar with and that gets three releases a year, is the key strategic focus of Salesforce.
Additionally, the CEO discussed how Salesforce added support for unstructured audio and video, more pre-built connectors for data ingestion, and new governance features to its Data Cloud service.
The showcase also highlighted a 33 per cent increase in accuracy for its Agentforce service. Benioff keenly noted how Agentforce now outperforms OpenAI on Azure. Following this remark, the company announced that Salesforce has “officially upgraded” Einstein Copilot to Agentforce.
In doing so, Salesforce hopes to make Agentforce more accessible to Salesforce customers.
Benioff also noted how Salesforce is bringing a new focus towards its integrated Slack application; he explained:
Slack is deeply integrated into Data Cloud, Flow, and our core platform, providing a consistent interface and a unified platform for your entire company and Customer 360.
Agentforce offers a unified platform and consistent interface, allowing users to have agents perform tasks within 360 apps through Slack without actually entering them. In addition to task performance, Agentforce in Slack will enable users to communicate with their cross-CRM data and highlight insights directly from the CRM platform.
