The launch of the ChatGPT in November 2022 made a significant impact on the way businesses are leveraging AI today. 

Companies have started embedding GPT within their applications to give customers a personalized experience and equip them to get stuff done faster and with greater accuracy. They are now looking at ways to leverage the power of Generative AI in data analytics.

So, how is Tableau riding this wave? That’s what we’re going to see in this blog post!

What is Tableau GPT?

Tableau GPT is Tableau’s answer to the AI-hungry data analytics practitioners. It helps organizations with not just turning data into insights but also converting those insights into actions.

Tableau GPT infuses automation in every part of analytics – from preparation to communicating and consuming the data. The intended audience of Tableau GPT is not just data analysts but also business users at all hierarchical levels!

Data Preparation is still one of the biggest challenges data analysts face today. Shaping the data would become much simpler for Tableau users after the release of Tableau GPT. Tableau GPT can effectively help you with faster data preparation.

With Natural Language prompts, you can generate formulas in seconds.

And that’s not all. Tableau GPT enables Tableau Pulse, an AI system that learns users’ analytics behavior and uncovers actionable insights automatically. We’ll take a quick look at the Tableau Pulse in the next section.

From a technology perspective, Tableau GPT relies on the Einstein GPT (Salesforce’s GPT built on OpenAI’s Chat GPT). The reason for incorporating Einstein GPT is primarily to leverage its ethical standards and security measures.

And now comes the important question – Can we experience Tableau GPT now? Hmm, we’ve got to wait a little longer.

The company launched a live demo of Tableau GPT recently, but it’s yet to gain a full shape for users. According to Tableau, we can expect to start using the Tableau GPT in Spring 2024.

Tableau Pulse- Powered by Tableau GPT

Tableau Pulse is a personalized analytics experience that runs on Tableau GPT. So, what exactly can we expect from the Tableau Pulse?

Tableau Pulse helps you to regularly keep track of relevant metrics and recommend insights that matter.  

It also suggests questions (to which you get the answer in a click) or you can type questions in Natural Language. For instance, “What’s driving the spike in sales in New York?” and get it answered by the pulse in seconds.

Tableau Pulse also provides answers related to your questions to make smart, data-driven decisions. We’ll share an example of this in the typical use cases section.

Further, Tableau Pulse’s user interface is so great. It allows you to share insight cards directly with other stakeholders from your Tableau Pulse screen. You can also add a quick note on your interpretation. This card can be directly sent to Slack and Gmail and notify the action required.

Slack users don’t even have to open Tableau Pulse to see the insight. Tableau GPT is embedded into Slack for the users to uncover AI-powered insights.

Typical Use Cases of Tableau GPT

In this section, let’s look at the typical use cases we could foresee now!

Data Preparation

As mentioned earlier, data preparation is one of the challenging parts of data analysis. Tableau GPT can help with generating formulas in the data modeling stage.

For example, assume you have a postal code column in your US customers dataset. Some codes have just 5 digits, like 94555, and others have an additional 4 digits to add granularity, example, 94555-1234. Here, you’re interested only in the first 5 digits, then you want to extract only those digits’ values in the column.

Now, you don’t have to write the formula to extract the values yourself. You can prompt Tableau GPT, like “Write a formula to extract the first 5 digits of the Postal Code column”. Then, Tableau GPT would process the prompt and generate the formula in seconds.

This relieves the users of the burden of mastering formulas. They must know what they need in the data preparation stage and type it in simple, natural language. Tableau GPT will do the heavy lifting for you!

Decision-making

Data analysis was all about turning data into insights for a long time. But how does Tableau GPT equip you to convert those insights into actions?

Let’s assume you ask, “What’s driving the spike in NBA merch sales in LA?” in Tableau Pulse.

Here’s an example response that you may get based on the dataset fed into Tableau:

• The spike in the NBA Merch sales in LA is primarily driven by CPC campaigns. 
• 80% of the NBA Merch stock in LA was sold out in the last 16 days. 
• The remaining 20% stock is expected to be sold out in the next 4 days. 
• The stock is at the risk of reaching the threshold level in a day.

The last statement clearly indicates the action required: refill the NBA Merch stock in the LA store. That’s awesome!  For next steps, you can simply send a message to the store stock manager in LA through Slack, Gmail, or Tableau Pulse.

Benefits of Tableau GPT

In this section, we’ll look at the benefits of Tableau GPT to leverage the power of data.

Extensive Data Democratization

With Tableau GPT, data analysis need not be just extracting insights from data and presenting them to top-level executives.

A production manager or a stock manager can leverage it to detect and eliminate problems even before they occur. In other words, it’s for employees at all hierarchical levels to leverage and produce a better organizational output. 

Time and Cost Savings

Data analysts can use the solution to generate formulas for data preparation, simplifying the process. Tableau GPT can produce a paradigm shift from the data-to-insights experience to the data-to-insights-to-action experience.

Conclusion

Along with Tableau Oracle connector’s user community, we are eagerly awaiting the general release of Tableau GPT in Spring 2024.

Tableau is now probably working hard to train the solution to improve accuracy and give users the best of the best. So, this waiting time is definitely worth it! 

Here’s something of interest before leaving. If you’re an Oracle user searching for an easy way to extract data or visualize it in Tableau,  BI Connector is a great tool. 

BI Connector empowers users to bring their data from OBIEE, OAC, OAS, OTBI, and Oracle Fusion Analytics (HCM, SCM, ERP, and CX) to Power BI and Tableau. 

As a certified Power BI connector, it helps connect data to Tableau Server and Desktop in Live and Extract Query modes. Further, BI Connector is easy to set up and saves cost and time for data analytics professionals. 

To get started, check out the banner below.