What to Know About Tableau Einstein: FAQ

Since the announcement of Tableau Einstein, we've been thrilled by all the enthusiasm and curiosity from our community, customers, and partners. Your excitement is palpable, and we're grateful for the outpouring of interest and feedback. As with any new innovation, we also understand that there are still many questions you have about the new platform, what it means for your organizations, the community, and careers.

We've gathered some of the most common questions about Tableau Einstein from our community to help provide some clarity—and we plan to update this post as more information becomes available. We appreciate you for sharing what you love about Tableau and partnering with us to continually improve the product for everyone.

What is Tableau Einstein and why now?

Tableau Einstein is a reimagined analytics experience: an open, composable, enterprise-grade data and analytics platform built on the Salesforce Platform and deeply integrated with Agentforce, a suite of customizable AI agents and tools. In today’s autonomous revolution, we have a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between siloed data and everyday workflows where people act on insights. This means we can harness AI to help tackle the most common and pressing data and analytics challenges—including fragmented data landscapes, a lack of trust in data, overlooked insights, and the reusability of analytics assets—in one platform.

Learn more about how we’re addressing these challenges in our blog, “What is Tableau Einstein?” and see Tableau Einstein in action by watching our keynote at Dreamforce 2024.

What are the benefits of Tableau Einstein being built on the Salesforce Platform?

Building Tableau Einstein natively on the Salesforce Platform allows us to offer a unique and truly unified analytics experience that brings together the best of Salesforce and Tableau technology. Tableau Einstein is the first BI platform with a workflow engine that spans the analytics journey from raw data, to a data lake, a semantic layer, a viz layer, and an action layer. As a completely open and API-first development platform, Tableau Einstein helps accelerate the development of analytics solutions and provides the ability to package up reusable, composable assets and offer them on a marketplace.

Salesforce’s Hyperforce cloud infrastructure provides world-class standards for security, compliance, agility, and scalability, backed by Salesforce’s continued commitment to privacy. With enterprise-grade governance and permissions, your analytics can reach a larger, global audience while meeting regional requirements for security and compliance. With a deep integration to Data Cloud, Tableau Einstein has the most modern data capabilities from zero-copy data ingestion to prep, data management, and semantics. Tableau Einstein is also deeply integrated with Agentforce and provides access to all of the latest no-code/low-code AI advancements and innovations.

Lastly, Salesforce CRM customers benefit from one place to centrally manage user permissions, administration, inherited security, and more.

Is Tableau Einstein valuable for me if I don't use other products from Salesforce?

Yes! Any organization can get more value from their data with Tableau Einstein through capabilities like data unification and orchestration, integrating practical insights where people work, and the ability to build, share, and reuse analytics assets and apps. And you don’t have to be an experienced Salesforce user to use Tableau Einstein.

For example, HR can analyze unstructured data from employee surveys with the help of an AI agent. A retail company can automatically forecast inventory risks, receive proactive alerts and relevant questions for exploring the data, and even take action from within Tableau Einstein, like submitting an inventory request to an ERP system. Because the platform is open and API-first, the possibilities are endless.

If Tableau Einstein is the future of Tableau, what happens to Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server, CRM Analytics, etc.?

Whether you have Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server, CRM Analytics, or any other analytics solution from Salesforce, you and your analytics assets are in good hands and will continue to be invested in. We have robust product roadmaps for each of these existing products today and will deliver on them—see all the latest capabilities we’ve released across the Tableau platform.

Remember that Tableau Einstein is going to be a journey as the vision rolls out; for many use cases today, our existing products will help you achieve your data and analytics goals. As we progress, our investments in Tableau Einstein will continue to drive innovation across these offerings. Additionally, Tableau Einstein is being built to work with existing products so that you can use both of them together as you progress in your journey.

Will existing products and Tableau Einstein work together? What happens to my Tableau assets?

Tableau and Tableau Einstein assets will be different, but compatible. For example, you’ll be able to work with Tableau Semantics from Tableau Einstein in Tableau Desktop. And starting soon you will be able to output your data from Prep Flows to Tableau Einstein's data layer DLOs. We are committed to offering tooling, guidance, and trusted partners to ensure your critical Tableau assets move forward. Helpful resources will be available soon.

Will Tableau Einstein be available for on-premises customers?

Tableau Einstein requires cloud-based deployment. That said, we are dedicated to supporting our existing on-premises customers via enhancements to Tableau Server so they can benefit from new innovations.

Does the Marketplace replace Tableau Public?

Tableau Public is here to stay as our community's free platform to connect and grow by exploring, creating, and sharing data visualizations about everyday topics of personal passion. We are excited to expand Tableau Public's capabilities to enable our community to create, share, and leverage reusable Tableau Einstein components through the new Marketplace.

What guidelines will there be around IP and data privacy for assets offered in the Marketplace?

IP protection and data privacy are critical not only for the marketplace but for the entire community. These are foundational principles in building Tableau Einstein. By developing Tableau Einstein natively on the Salesforce platform, we can leverage the same robust capabilities that independent software vendors (ISVs) use to ensure the security and integrity of their solutions on Salesforce. This makes IP protection and data privacy central to our strategy. Additionally, we are committed to further investing in advanced tools to prevent, detect, and address any potential issues, ensuring ongoing protection for all our users.

Can I use my own data lakehouse or semantic layer if I’ve already invested in another technology?

We understand that many organizations have made deep investments in other tools, and our roadmap includes connecting them to Tableau Einstein to allow you to use them together. Customers can use their own data lakehouse by leveraging Data Cloud connectors—this includes batch and streaming ingestion, zero copy, and bring-your-own-lake capabilities. We are working on the ability to translate an existing semantics layer from another system to reuse in Tableau Einstein. We are also working on opening the Tableau Einstein semantic layer completely, so that it can work with existing semantic layers in the market (like dbt).

Does Tableau Einstein support multiple languages for global teams who want to standardize and scale data sets, models, and workflows across geographies?

Tableau Einstein will support the 18 languages that core Salesforce products support, with initial English support for Insight Services and Packaged App Content, expanding after February 2025. Multi-currency is another area we are looking to support. 

How can I get started with Tableau Einstein today? What are the licensing and pricing options?

To get started with Tableau Einstein, Tableau+ is the best path forward as this offering includes many of the modular components of Tableau Einstein, available today. For all customers, this package includes everything you need to get started right now: Data Cloud for unified data modeling capabilities, Tableau Pulse to empower your teams with personalized metrics and digests, and Tableau Agent (formerly Einstein Copilot for Tableau) to begin your path with generative AI.

As we prepare to deliver licensing and pricing options in the near future, we are working diligently to ensure existing analytics customers have an affordable path to Tableau Einstein.