Tableau Conference 25 Opening Keynote First Takeaways from The Crunch

With the spring conference season heating up, it always reminds me of how great an opportunity it is for vendors to maxamize the attention their conference opening keynotes will generate for them.  While these conferences usually last three or four days, and because there's a lot of things happening, the one thing that will get the most eyeballs is the opening keynote. And while the bigger vendor events can have thousands of folks physically sitting in the keynote arena, you now can reach exponentially more folks who could watch virtually.

OK, so not every company is going to have literally millions of folks watching its keynote like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang did at the GTC event, but the ability to reach so many people during a keynote offers a unique opportunity to tell your story and hopefully create and extend customer relationships.  This is why opening keynotes also get the attention of industry analysts and influencers, because it gives them a chance to understand the big picture for each company and a big picture of the industry as a whole. 

Now it's a given that conferences show what's going on companies (product sessions, customer stories, event pre briefs, executive interviews, etc.), the keynote really sets the tone. It's one of the reasons Paul Greenberg and I started doing CRM Playaz keynote watch parties, so we can give our first reactions to what we're seeing and hearing in real time. 

Although we've done a lot of them in the past, we had never done a Tableau Conference opening keynote watch party. This year I was able to join long-time industry analysts Rebecca Wetteman and David Smith, hosts of the PPN show The Crunch, for a Crunch watch party.

This is a clip of our conversation (including an edited transcript) after watching the hour-plus opening keynote.  These are our initial thoughts based just on the opening keynote. And while we know there were in-depth sessions that went into detail on things like Tableau Next (Salesforce’s next-generation agent-driven analytics platform) and Blueprint (a comprehensive framework to help organizations become analtics-driven in the agentic AI era), we focused on the keynote.

Edited Transcript

David Smith: Yeah. So nothing on GA (general availability) for Tableau Next pricing.

Rebecca Wettemann: I think they're still working out pricing for Tableau Next.

I'd love to hear more about Blueprint because they went through that super-quickly. I think there's a lot of potential value there, but it's hard to get it from a 30-second window.

Smith: What they showed was a lot of complexity, you know, pretty high-level workflows. I'm wondering if they're aiming to, you know, make analysis easier for everyday users. They didn't really show a lot of that democratization.

Wettemann: As much as they talked about AI not taking the business analysts job, it is taking part of that job.

Brent Leary: They need to word that different going in the future.

Wettemann: A great workshop at this conference would be a 30-minute figure out, you know, give everybody an index card and have them put three things that they can do that AI will never be able to do, so that when they're in the elevator with their boss' boss and they ask why they'll need you, they’ll have an answer for that.

Leary: I think they had to do something in terms of giving some cues to what the price is going to be. I know this is the opening keynote, but a lot of people are still trying to figure out where does this all come in from a financial perspective. And even if they didn't focus a lot on it, they could have had a little something that gives people at least a high-level understanding.

He also said that he gets a lot of questions on if Tableau is going away. I think they could have done a little bit more around how Tableau fits into the overall scheme for Salesforce.

Wettemann: And talking about where Tableau sits across the broader Salesforce portfolio, they could say "Yes, we're continuing to develop and invest in Tableau but recognize that Tableau is the data science and analytics platform for Salesforce. So if you're using Marketing Cloud, you're using Tableau. If you're using customer experience intelligence, you're using Tableau. You're using all of these pieces; Tableau is the foundation for those. We don't necessarily see that when we get this sort of layer-cake slide of the entire Salesforce platform. I think that's a point worth making.

Smith: We didn't see that synergy between Data Cloud integration into the Salesforce ecosystem. They showed the Databricks stuff, which I thought was interesting, to choose the Databricks example.

Leary: The agents that they identified; people were actually applauding for them. It was the Concierge agent.

Wettemann: I think the Inspector agent could have gotten more time, too, because I think that is interesting - the ability to set proactive alerts. Right?

If we go back to the supply chain and tariff example, being able to say "Give me an alert if a certain dollar amount of my suppliers are in certain places that are impacted," I'd be able to set some thresholds for that to tell me when those situations are happening or are going to happen. Boy, all of that kind of stuff I know would make people sleep a little bit better at night.

Leary: You got consumption [pricing], you got subscriptions. They have to address at a very high level where does all this fit.

Wettemann: I think they were working on it. I think the $2 a conversation thing scared a lot of people; I can use AgentForce in so many different ways across the organization, in different ways that deliver different scales of value. How do I account for that in a pricing model without making it like a million SKUs?

Leary: There's going to be a lot of people that say this stuff looks great, but can I afford it?

Wettemann: A lot of the recent bundles have included a certain number of Data Cloud credits. But without people really knowing what that looks like in terms of actual consumption, that's hard to predict, plan, and move beyond pilot.

Smith: There are no hints. Will it be part of existing licenses or require new add-ons?  

Leary: It's a good time to get that buttoned up.

Wettemann: I know it's something they're working on. But when you start thinking about all the different permutations of how this stuff can deliver value, all of the different compensation levels of the people from a productivity perspective, getting that down to something crisp.

I think the folks that have gotten this done the best and switched from this proceed to consumption with AI are the folks at Verint.

Leary: It’s been two years since they really introduced that, right?

Wettemann: Yeah, they really bit the bullet and said, "We got to go on value, and we've got to go on not necessarily just consumption because it's more complex than that.

Leary: it's not just about pricing models. It's about restructuring the way people do work and how that fits into the equation as well.

Wettemann: And remember, you got to communicate this out to a sales team too so that can actually sell this.

I'm really interested to see what's in the marketplace. I think that's a really key area as I think about getting this out to a broader user. Talking to the business analysts about how they feel about how this message is setting in. And then what are those three things they say to their boss on the elevator because the job of that data analyst is so very valuable. But they need to be able to explain that value.

Leary: They’ve got to be able to explain why it becomes even more valuable. This actually ends up being a really good opportunity if they grab hold of it and think of it like that.

Wettemann: We saw some nice tight demos today, but most bosses are not going to be able to, in conversational language, ask Tableau to give them the perfect answer to the question. They're going to need that data whisperer to do a lot of that work for them.

I'm going to be looking closely at the Blueprint stuff, too.

Leary: I would have liked to have heard more about that.

Smith: With the marketplace, you have to know how curated is that?

Wettemann: Or how will foster genuine collaboration, or will it become a dumping ground for stuff.

Leary: The one thing that I really appreciate about Salesforce TDX is how they incorporated not only the community but also AgentForce Exchange. They incorporated community and the exchange a little bit more cohesively into that keynote. And I came away with a better understanding of how all those things fit. I'm not necessarily on that same level with what we just saw.

Wettemann: I'm curious, too, about the Slack channel.

Smith: So I was at Carnival last week. It's funny, guys. They unleashed something called Canva Sheets. It looked like an interesting new competitor to a Power BI or Tableau. It was you able to do data visualizations, and, from a design perspective, make it look pretty.