Expanding augmented analytics to help more people get answers from their data

When it comes to asking questions of their data, how comfortable are most people in your organization? Even with a deep understanding of the business, if your users can’t find the right data or navigate dashboards to answer their questions, they aren’t likely to embrace analytics for making decisions. Many of our customers face these challenges, which can slow analytics adoption and their progress toward building a Data Culture.

The more people that can answer questions from data, the better outcomes organizations will drive. Leaders see the value of self-service analytics, but if their employees can’t confidently ask questions and get insights, how can they expect their organization to be more data-driven? 

At Tableau, we are relentless in our mission to help people see and understand data. To help transform the way people work with data, we’re putting AI-powered analytics into the flow of business so everyone can make better decisions, faster. Earlier this year we shared the development of Tableau Business Science that brought the power of data science and AI to business people. Now, we're extending AI to every employee with reimagined augmented analytics capabilities, empowering more people to go from curious to confident—even if they don’t know where to start.

Ask Data lets your users answer business questions with natural language. It’s as simple as typing your question and getting visual answers as a response. Ask Data provides an intuitive, guided experience to build queries without dragging and dropping or needing to understand dimensions and measures. Autocorrect and synonym recognition help fill in gaps to best represent the user’s intent behind their questions. 

Ask Data can be integrated directly in dashboards so users can go from seeing curated data to asking the next question with a single click. You can embed Ask Data in any portal or application to broaden the impact even further. And now, any licensed Tableau user has access to Ask Data to answer their questions—Creators, Explorers and Viewers. 

New in Ask Data, Lenses allow analysts and dashboard authors to curate natural language experiences as a single source of truth. This means Lenses can be set up for specific use cases enabling different teams to query the same data source in the context of their own business. For example, a single column might be known by one team as “sales,” by another as “revenue,” and by another as “invoices.” Shared, discoverable and scalable. With Lenses, each team will get results that are familiar and relevant to their own work. 

“Ask Data opens up an opportunity to close the gap between advanced analysts and a broader, general business audience, allowing anyone to connect and explore data.” said Ilya Kovalenko, ‎Data Analyst & Visualization Team Lead, Siemens. 

Explain Data focuses the insight discovery process by running statistical models and checking hundreds of potential explanations behind the value of a specific data point. With language that everyday users can understand, the most informative explanations automatically surface as fully functional Tableau vizzes that can be further explored. And now, Explain Data is available to all licensed Tableau users in a redesigned experience.

Explain Data also reduces the risk of error from dirty data or selection bias by searching for explanations in the entire data source, beyond what is shown in the viz. This helps people find the best explanation with increased confidence in the quality of their conclusions. 

Einstein, the AI technology developed by Salesforce, already powers 99 billion predictions and recommendations every single day. And Einstein Discovery offers an intuitive, no-code environment to leverage machine learning models and integrate predictions and recommendations through the CRM experience. Earlier this year, we brought the power of Einstein Discovery into Tableau to expand predictive capabilities in dashboards, calculations, and more. Now, we’re adding new augmented analytics capabilities into CRM workflows to help Salesforce users get powerful insights faster and take action directly where they are already spending their time.

Einstein Discovery for Reports helps your CRM users get AI-powered insights directly within Salesforce Reports so they can quickly understand what happened and why it happened, and take action intelligently. Einstein automatically and thoroughly analyzes data and surfaces important insights. Then, with a click, users can go directly into Einstein Discovery to further explore the data and deploy machine learning models.

Ask Data for Salesforce enables Salesforce customers to ask questions of their CRM data using natural language, getting instant answers in the form of dashboards, insight, and recommendations tailored to their business. Dashboard recommendations and semantic search are available in the Salesforce Summer ‘21 release release, with natural language capabilities coming as a pilot this fall. 

Our continued investment in augmented analytics is just one way Tableau is democratizing data and bringing powerful analytical capabilities to more people. We are excited to enable business experts and teams across all skill levels to analyze and better answer their most pressing questions—anywhere those questions arise in the flow of business.

When AI is approachable and transparent, it can build people’s confidence in analytics, increase their trust in the outcomes, and help them make valuable decisions when it matters most. This confidence is critical in fostering a Data Culture where people aren’t just comfortable using data for making decisions, but prioritize data over instincts and “the way it’s always been done.”

We believe that people are smart, naturally curious, and driven to find creative solutions to solve business challenges when empowered with the right technology to aid their domain expertise. Our approach to augmented analytics focuses on super-powering human analysis, not automating the decision-making.

By helping people ask the best questions, offering faster and more thorough analysis, and making smart recommendations, AI-powered augmented analytics lowers the barrier to entry for more advanced analytics in the hands of more people. And we’re already seeing how this helps increase analytics adoption and encourage organizations to be more data-driven—for example, one of our large retail customers saw a 22% increase in adoption when deploying Ask Data to business users across the enterprise.

Learn more about AI analytics from Tableau, and see what’s new in augmented analytics.