Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Demby, Director of Solution Engineering at Tableau.

Join us as we chat about Tableau Pulse, Tableau Einstein, and how easy it is to get started.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with John Demby.

Getting to know Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein

John leads a team of demo engineers for Tableau. What that means is they get their hands on all the new solutions and products ahead of time, and use them to make cool things. And two of the coolest, newest things out there are Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein.

Tableau Einstein takes all of the goodness of Tableau, the powerful features of Data Cloud, a new semantic layer called Tableau Semantics, and brings that into Salesforce. There’s also a Tableau Agent, allowing you to open up the power of business intelligence and analytics to everyone on your team through Agentforce.

Introduction to Tableau Pulse

“We started thinking about how people consume data,” John says, “and I think it’s changed.” People want to consume data within the flow of their work. They don’t want to have to go looking around for things, or sift through multiple dashboards to figure out what information is relevant.

That’s where Tableau Pulse comes in. It provides contextual, relevant insights from your data directly into Salesforce. With a simple KPI scorecard, you and your users can see what metrics are up, what metrics are down, and get insights about the next steps you should take.

AI-infused and ready to share

The scorecards Tableau Pulse provides are just the beginning because you can also ask it questions. Pulse is AI-infused, meaning you can ask plain language questions to generate specific insights about your data. It’s also built for collaboration, so it’s easy to take these insights and start a conversation with anyone else in your organization.

Getting Tableau Pulse is as easy as installing a managed package in your Salesforce instance. “We’ve made it really for a Salesforce Admin to set this up with little to no Tableau experience,” John says. There are nine premade dashboards to get you started, and it’s easy to customize things to get something that works for you.

John shares a lot more great stuff about Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we've got the much loved John Demby, our resident Tableau guru, here to talk about some of the really super cool things that Tableau has come out with, specifically Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein. Now, you may remember John and his team create these amazing demos that really show all of the possibilities of Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein. And boy, we get into it, about how we're driving insights with AI, and of course we talk about why pie charts are so out. This is really a fun episode. Now before we get started just a quick reminder, if you want to hit that follow button, that way whatever podcast app you're listening to, every Thursday a new episode will be downloaded right to your phone. So with that, let's talk Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein and get John on the podcast. John, welcome to the podcast.

John Demby: Hey Mike, it's great to be back.

Mike Gerholdt: I know, it's been a while. So what have you been up to? What do you do at Salesforce, for the people that haven't run into you at our many events?

John Demby: Well, I have I think today the coolest job in the world. I work in our pre-sales organization in solution engineering but what I do is, I lead a team of demo engineers. You might go, demo engineers, why is that really cool? Well, we get our hands on the solutions and the products ahead of our customers. We get to put it through its paces and figure out what it really can do and how it can do it, and then we build these just really ... pardon the expression, kick-ass demos to show to our customers and to anybody else that wants to see them. So yeah, that's what I do. I lead a team and they are all all-stars and amazing people, and we have just been killing it.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, it sounds like fun. I mean, that's also what admins do, get our hands on stuff and try and build killer demos to get our executives to fund it.

John Demby: Yeah, we've got a lot of similarities there.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, I mean, also a very close kinship. You kind of started out with Tableau the same way I did, you were just a super admin power user that got hired on.

John Demby: Yeah. My story goes back to a long time ago ... man, probably about 12, 13, 14 years ago, I was working with Salesforce data. I was leading at that time a pre-sales organization, and I couldn't get a decent report out of Salesforce, no offense to dashboards and reports. It was partly because of the way we had configured our Salesforce data. I mean, we had the same company in Salesforce maybe 70 times because they were all around the globe and stuff like that. I couldn't figure out where my solution engineers were spending their time. I did a Google search, found this really cool thing called Tableau, downloaded it, and within about 10 minutes I had the report that I'd been wanting to make for months. So I filed that away and became a power user of Tableau, and then when I was ready for a career change, it just worked out. Tableau and I made things happen, came to work for Tableau. I did some pre-sales work for Tableau and then we got acquired by Salesforce. And then I got to do all sorts of cool things, like move into the office of the chief product officer where I worked on Salesforce Tableau integration strategies, and now I get to lead my fun team.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I remember ... Well, I mean, you're right, there's totally a limitation on the reports and dashboard stuff. But I remember the last time we talked, one of the things you gave me the insight into was just all the visualizations that Tableau could do. I think it was, "The biggest common mistake is, everybody makes a pie chart."

John Demby: Oh yeah, pie charts are not very good for analyzing data, believe it or not. But yeah, we build that into the product. In fact, when you start analyzing your data in Tableau, we actually propose or suggest or give you the best practice visualization for what you're trying to find.

Mike Gerholdt: So it's not a dashboard of pies.

John Demby: No, not a dashboard of pies.

Mike Gerholdt: That's okay. We have AI now, so let's talk about that because we've got Tableau Einstein and Pulse. Help me figure out what these are because these sound fun.

John Demby: Well, I want to talk to you a lot about Pulse today, but let's talk about Tableau Einstein real quick. So Tableau Einstein ... Well, just back up. AI in general is disrupting everything and very much so in the business analytics space. Two years ago I went to the Gartner Data and Analytics Conference, and all the vendors were starting to talk about AI. Last year, it was the subject of everybody. It was everybody had a cockpit, or a copilot rather, and were starting to feed data into LLMs, and now it just got to be part of the table stakes of the application. You've got to be able to use the power of AI to be able to generate and understand and see things even quicker. So what we did with Tableau Einstein is, we are envisioning a new paradigm infused with AI and built on the Salesforce platform. So we're actually taking all of the goodness of Tableau, we're bringing it over to Salesforce, we're using all of the fantastic features of Data Cloud. We're adding things like a new semantic layer that ...

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