Salesforce's Einstein Copilot now available on Tableau

Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot is spreading its wings – the generative AI assistant is now available as part of Tableau.

The beta of Einstein Copilot for Tableau was released this week, bringing natural language queries to the Salesforce data analytics platform.

Salesforce is pitching the new addition to Tableau as a way of broadening access to data analysis by making it simpler for users to query a company’s information.

According to Salesforce, the AI assistant will allow non-expert users to get to grips with data in Tableau. For those who don’t quite know how to start exploring corporate information, the service can suggest questions based on the data it’s determined is relevant to a particular user – sales for a particular region, for example – and present outputs in an appropriate chart format.

It will also let users stack conversations in a conversational style, posing follow-up queries within the context of the initial question.

Einstein Copilot aims to take some of the work out of learning complex calculation syntax by using AI to walk users through how to build queries. Users can post their desired outcome – such as extracting a postcode from an address – into the Einstein Copilot chat box, and the AI assistant will suggest the required syntax.

Einstein Copilot for Tableau availability

Einstein Copilot for Tableau is currently in beta testing with a number of customers and is scheduled to hit general availability this summer.

Einstein Copilot was launched in public beta in February of this year, as part of Einstein 1, Enterprise and Unlimited Editions.

The initial release was designed to let staff query company CRM data via natural language prompts, with use cases that include creating or summarising corporate content and automating tasks. A set of actions – such as common business tasks and automated responses – come pre-programmed with the AI assistant, while others can be customised around particular business functions.

In a crowded market of generative AI assistants, Salesforce is hoping to sell users on Einstein Copilot security features, provided via the company’s Einstein Trust Layer – forgetting users’ prompts and outputs once the results have been returned, for example.

According to Grand View Research, the generative AI market was worth $13 billion globally last year, with the analyst house predicting a compound annual growth rate of over 36% for the rest of the decade.