Newest Tableau Release Expands AI-Powered Analytics with Explain Data

Tableau 2019.3 Brings Automatic Data Insights to Tableau Platform and Extends Natural Language Functionality to Enable Analytics for Everyone

Tableau Software, the leading analytics platform, announced the general availability of Explain Data, a new capability built directly in Tableau that enables people to experience the power of advanced statistical analysis with a single click. With no complex data modeling or data science expertise required, anyone is able to instantly uncover AI-driven insights about their data. Explain Data uses sophisticated statistical algorithms to analyze all available data on behalf of the analyst and automatically explain the most relevant factors driving any given data point. In doing so, Explain Data brings powerful analytics to more people and helps them discover insights that would be difficult or time-consuming to find. Explain Data is available today at no extra charge as part of Tableau’s latest release, Tableau 2019.3.

“With Explain Data, we’re bringing the power of AI-driven analysis to everyone and making sophisticated statistical analysis more accessible so that, regardless of expertise, anyone can quickly and confidently uncover the ‘Why?’ behind their data,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau. “Explain Data will empower people to focus on the insights that matter and accelerate the time to action and business impact.”

Explain Data accelerates the analytical process and helps people quickly discover and understand the factors influencing changes within their data – with no set up, data prep or data modeling required. Traditionally, to understand the cause driving a particular data point or outlier, people must manually determine and validate the potential explanations, a process that can be time consuming and miss plausible answers. With the release of Explain Data in Tableau 2019.3, they can simply select a data point in a visualization and Tableau will use powerful Bayesian statistical methods to automatically evaluate hundreds of patterns and potential explanations across all the available data in seconds. Explain Data delivers the most relevant, statistically significant explanations as interactive visualizations which customers can further explore with the full power of Tableau.

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Explain Data also reduces the risk of error from human bias that can restrict analysis, helping people uncover meaningful insights they may have missed. A person tasked with answering a data question like, “What’s contributing to customer churn?” often must limit their analysis to a set of predetermined hypotheses. Explain Data evaluates every dimension in the data set automatically, and makes it possible for anyone to uncover hidden insights. Explain Data augments a person’s skills and inherent understanding of the data with advanced statistical techniques that would otherwise be reserved for experts.

“Within JLL, thousands of employees use Tableau on a daily basis to help them see and understand their data. The evolution of self-service analytics is that people are empowered to ask even more questions of their data; going from intrigue to insight. We anticipate Explain Data will be a game changer that enables guided analytics and helps people to ask the right questions and uncover insights faster,” said Simon Beaumont, Global BI CoE Director, at JLL. “Explain Data allows anyone, whatever their level of data knowledge, to explore their data and ‘go beyond the number’ to understand not only the what, but also the why – the true definition of democratizing data.”

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Tableau 2019.3 Expands NLP Functionality; Introduces New Connectors and Enhanced Security

Dozens of new product features are also included with the upgrade to Tableau 2019.3 including new ways to engage with Tableau’s natural language (NLP) capability, Ask Data. Now, Ask Data’s natural language functionality can be embedded, such as within a company portal or Intranet page, so that more people are encouraged to use the capability as part of their daily role, asking data questions in plain language like, “What were my sales in Seattle last month?” With the ability to embed Ask Data, organizations will enable even more people to interact with data, empowering employees with a visualization that they can continue to refine and explore using Tableau’s full analytics capabilities.

For added layers of security, Tableau Server customers can now encrypt their data extracts at rest, ensuring all extracts published and stored via Tableau Server are encrypted. Tableau also continues to add new data connectors to the platform with every release. With 2019.3, customers using Spark for machine learning and data science can now benefit from a native data connector to Databricks. Additionally, all Tableau products are now available in localized versions for Italian.

Alongside the release of Tableau 2019.3, today, Tableau announced the launch of Tableau Catalog, a new set of cataloging capabilities now included in the Data Management Add-On that provide a holistic view of all the data used in Tableau for improved visibility and enhanced data discovery. Additionally, to offer customers more control in how they manage and scale business critical deployments, Tableau released a new offering to address the unique security, manageability and scalability needs of enterprise customers, the Tableau Server Management Add-On.

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