# Tableau's core audience is changing | Tableau 2023 Keynote Full Commentary & Thoughts

> 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:** 2023-05-22
- **Format:** Video · 128 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Industry trends, Tool strategy, Community
- **Tools:** Power BI; Tableau (ai, cloud, public, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-s-core-audience-is-changing-tableau-2023-keynote-full-commentary-thoughts
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nX82GfKLck

I sit down with the full Tableau 2023 keynote and give my unfiltered, unedited commentary — the opinions I deliberately leave out of my neutral summaries. I dig into the virtual conference experience, the investor-focused messaging, the cloud-first direction, and the big underlying signal that Tableau is shifting its focus away from its core authoring audience towards consumers, developers and IT.

## Key takeaways

- Tableau's keynote increasingly reads as an investor and market message — revenue run rate, customer counts and year-on-year growth — rather than content aimed at the everyday author.
- The repeated emphasis on 'everyone' and 'consumers' signals that Tableau is deliberately targeting the 70% of people who don't build dashboards, not the 30% power-author community.
- Tableau Cloud is now the clearly preferred platform, with quarterly releases versus Tableau Server's six-monthly cadence, so server is being positioned as the secondary experience.
- Salesforce Data Cloud is now powered by Tableau's Hyper engine, which reveals a core reason Salesforce acquired Tableau beyond simply needing an analytics product.
- Customer support being raised on stage by the new CEO is an open acknowledgement that support quality has slipped as the company has grown.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Why I'm doing a full commentary
- 1:23 The keynote opens: setup and seating
- 5:18 The disappointing virtual experience
- 8:36 20 years of Tableau and innovation
- 13:32 Salesforce 360 and investor messaging
- 16:46 Revenue, metrics and the cloud direction
- 23:31 Ryan Aitay, support and the GPT hints
- 27:24 Salesforce Data Cloud powered by Tableau
- 29:35 Data skills pledge and community numbers
- 32:12 Larissa, ambassadors and Visionaries
- 40:36 A new day for data: the 30% versus 70%
- 52:00 The three tenets and devs on stage

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-s-core-audience-is-changing-tableau-2023-keynote-full-commentary-thoughts

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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