Tableau Conference 2025 Recap
In this blog post I’ll be discussing the main news points and interesting items that was presented during the 2025 Tableau Conference that happened from April 15th to April 17th. We’ll talk about the Keynote, Devs on Stage and more.
Keynote
The Tableau Conference, held in San Diego, drew in over 8,000 attendees. During the Keynote Tableau CEO Ryan Aytay, Tableau Chief Product Officer Southard Jones, and Tableau Chief Marketing Officer Rekha Srivatsan talk about try to bring positivity to the “data fam” Tableau community after some negative feedback.
A significant focus of the Keynote was the evolving role of data analytics, particularly with AI advancements. There’s a new wave going on and now we’re stuck with questions like: How will AI change the nature of work? Can I trust AI Agents? How can I prepare for the changes AI will bring to my job? Tableau calls this the new agentic reality.
In the current Tableau ecosystem we have the following roles:
- Data Prep
- Data Analysis
- Data Story Telling
- Building Dashboards
- Data Cleansing
- Data Connections
This will all still be there but enhanced with Tableau Next…
1. Tableau Next
They introduced “Tableau Next,” a new initiative aimed at enhancing data analytics capabilities without abandoning traditional Tableau. As shown in the image below, Tableau Next exists next to/together with Tableau Cloud, Prep,…
Ryan – We’re not abandoning Tableau. We’re extending it. Desktop, Server, Cloud and Prep are all here to stay. Tableau Next doesn’t replace your existing tools – it connects with them. Desktop users can still build locally.
Tableau Next boasts features like an open data layer, improved semantic modeling, and integrated action layer for effective insights delivery. Demonstrations illustrated how AI-assisted analytics and visualization tools can enhance the analytics workflow, offering quicker responses to business inquiries.
- Data Layer
Data is at the core of everything we do, Tableau boasts that it now will be simpler than ever to connect and unify your data with their ‘open data layer’. The new layer boosts speed, enhances security, and cuts storage costs.
- Semantic Layer
This ‘AI powered’ layer will help build a single source of truth of your data. The semantic models build can be shared through the entire organization again helping analyst with modeling their data and not doing extra repetitive actions.
- Visualization Layer
The visualization layer will be an API first experience. Making your Tableau experience more cost effective, scalable and performant.
This will be a renewed interface for Tableau with reusable templates, a cleaner design and embedded delivery of your dashboards and graphs.
- Action Layer
With the action layer, you’ll be able to bring automation into play. Make smoother workflows, automate tasks with AI, …
On top of all these layers will be agents that will help analysts, business, etc with questions that they would want Tableau to help them with.
They gave us 3 examples of such agents:
- Data Pro: helps with your data preparation
- Concierge: provides ‘immediate’ and reliable answers to your data questions.
- Inspector: gives pro-active feedback. Monitoring your data , analyzing trends, predicting improvements and sending out alerts where needed to the correct persons.
2. Other topics
During the KeyNote they’ve also mentioned that they’ll be simplifying their pricing system. So potentially keep a look out on upcoming changes later this year.
Definitely, one of the lesser points of the presentation was the following slide. They talked about what was achieved/delivered in the last year. (which we know). This is different from what they did last year, where they gave us a list of features to expect to come in the year.
Devs on Stage
During ‘Devs on Stage’ they have presented a bunch of features that are, will be and might be in Tableau. We’ll go over some of them:
1. Recycle bin
Already announced (and should be?) part of the 2025.1 release. For server and cloud you’ll now have a 30 day recycle bin.
2. Rounded corners
A very simple thing but meanwhile still big. You’ll be able to apply rounded corners to dashboard objects (containers, worksheets, …)
3. Data Prep enhancements
A bunch of Data Prep enhancements were presented. Firstly they announced the support of custom Python scripts directly within your Tableau Prep workflows in Tableau Cloud. This will allow for more complex data manipulation, statistical modeling and custom cleaning that Tableau Prep does not offer built in.
For the second enhancement, they announced an extra output option. Tableau Prep can now publish output of it’s flows directly into Google Drive. This gives us an alternative to deliver the data in a file for users or analysts.
Thirdly, they’ve talked about running your Prep workflows directly in the database. No more extracts needed with the benefit of improved performance.
4. Custom Color Palettes
It will become possible to create custom color palettes. (No more manually editing your Preferences file). You can even have AI help you create the color palette if needed, in the presentation on stage they described what they wanted and the AI created the palette from them.
5. Dynamic Color Palette Range
You can have the color palette that is applied to your graphs change based on the current view. (Eg: after filters). If for example one country is a big outlier compared to other countries. If you were to filter only on Europe the color palette range would change based on Europe and not be skewed by the other data that’s not shown.
6. Google Workspace
You’ll be able to push your Tableau items directly into Google Sheets and Slides. The new Add-ons will allow you to embed dashboards and metrics in your Google documents, sheets and presentations. Do note it will still require a manual process to update them once they’re in a document.
7. DBT Connector
8. “Show Me” enhancements (“Choose Me”)
A new version of “Show Me” will be released. The AI will not only suggest chart types based on your data structure but also take into account your objective. EG: You want to use a specific visual type and it will suggest dimensions and measures to use.
9. Maps (Viewport)
It will become possible to use multiple maps within your dashboard. Where each maps could display a different granularity but still with the possibility to filter between the two. Eg: one of the two shows Subway Lines and the other one shows a more detailed map with street info, building info etc. With the viewport parameter it would be possible to drag one of the maps (so move locations) and as a result the second map would perform the same dragging action automatically.
10. Pulse NLQ
Aside from providing insights on specific metrics, Pulse will now also be able to answer question on those metrics with conversational analytics.
11. Activity Log enhancements
A very interesting one. The Activity Log will now also capture detailed user interactivity events. This will help us understand how the users are using our dashboards.
Among the might be’s, we have the following three items that were presented as Lab Sneak Peak, which might or might not come to Tableau:
12. Authoring API
An API that would allow us to programmatically interact with the Tableau Environment. Eg: generating reports via AI, automating dashboard layouts and formatting, automating dashboard translations, …
13. Tableau Pulse Research Agent
This one sounds futuristic and I’m not sure if it will work. Similar to OpenAI’s Deep Research, it will try to answer why questions. Investigate root causes, relationships of why your metrics is high or low and would event suggest actions.
14. Sketch Tool
This one was a very weird one and I doubt very useful. Filtering data based on drawing a shape. You would draw a line a through fuzzy matching it would try to find this line/trend in your data set.
