# Tableau AI: My 2024 Retrospective on Tableau Agents, Agentic Ai and Salesforce

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2025-01-22
- **Format:** Video · 49 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** AI & ML, Industry trends, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Tableau (ai, prep, pulse, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-ai-my-2024-retrospective-on-tableau-agents-agentic-ai-and-salesforce
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVkH9CMrmhU

This is my point-in-time retrospective on where Tableau and Salesforce stand with AI at the close of 2024. I set the wider AI industry context, share my personal principles for using AI, walk through Salesforce's Einstein platform and responsible-development guidelines, then critique Tableau Pulse, Tableau Agent and the cloud-first, web-only direction of travel.

## Key takeaways

- The 2024 AI trends worth tracking are multimodal models, larger context windows, agentic AI, edge/local models, RAG and chain-of-thought reasoning, and packaged foundational models.
- Tableau Pulse uses statistical methods for the analysis and only applies generative AI to summarise insights, while Tableau Agent (formerly Einstein Copilot) is confined to web authoring and Tableau Prep, not desktop or server.
- Salesforce does have solid responsible-AI documentation - guidelines covering accuracy, safety, honesty, empowerment and sustainability, plus an acceptable-use policy - but it is buried and Tableau is barely referenced in the headline AI fact sheet.
- Tableau Agent works well in Prep where the context is small, but misfires in web authoring; calling it 'agentic' overstates what is really still a copilot experience.
- Tableau's pricing only exposes AI in the opaque, quote-based Tableau Plus tier, which speaks to the paying customer and a future 'curator' role rather than today's desktop-bound creators.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Why I remade this video three times
- 1:56 Setting the 2024 AI landscape
- 5:16 Key AI trends of 2024
- 10:25 My personal principles for AI
- 15:37 Salesforce and the Einstein platform
- 20:24 Salesforce's responsible AI principles
- 22:51 Tableau's AI features explained
- 29:26 Architecture and cloud-first critique
- 31:13 Purpose and empowerment in Tableau Agent
- 38:02 Ethics of AI models
- 39:14 Pricing and who the customer is
- 47:16 Good karma and the community

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-ai-my-2024-retrospective-on-tableau-agents-agentic-ai-and-salesforce

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena