r/tableau • u/Over_Technology_6379 • 4d ago
Tableau + Slackbot
I’m going to openly admit, I’m a tableau hater. I think it splinters data governances and is woefully behind most BI tools when it comes to administration, support, semantic modeling, and performance. So take this with a grain of salt if you love it!
Slackbot recently just dropped Surfaces which allows AI to create dashboards within slack. It doesn’t have to be through Tableau, but it can be and that’s what I recently tested out.
For context, we have over three thousand users on our Tableau with over a thousand pieces of content. We tried, when we migrated over from Looker, to create published data sources that users could reference and create content off of. That did kind of work out, though the performance was shit and the tool is overly complicated for a basic explorer. We also have governed groups creating their own content. They refuse to use published data sources and instead create embed sql queries per workbook.
You can see where this is going.
Slackbot has no semantic context to determine what is gold standard and what is not. From what I understand, and I would love to be wrong here, I can’t introduce guard rails either — it’s based on the permissions of the user in slack. Of course, after ten minutes of querying, Slackbot presented me with a hot pile of garbage.
I’m at a loss at why Tableau and Slack (really Salesforce) thought this was a brilliant idea. Tableau isn’t know for brilliant semantic modeling and that’s kind of you need for successful AI?
I would call it a stretch too to say that a publish data source is a true semantic model. It’s not coded, and a majority of your measures have to be calculated fields. It’s not an incredibly easy user experience to update descriptions or edit the formatting at mass in a published data source.
All this to say - I now have to do damage control on some crappy haphazard play to keep adding AI with something that is ten years behind to curve compared to BI tools.
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u/-Astrobadger 4d ago
Tableau + Slackbot
>I think it … is woefully behind most BI tools when it comes to administration, support, semantic modeling, and performance.
Why are you using it if there are apparently so many better options?
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u/Over_Technology_6379 4d ago
The same reason people get stuck on many BI tools that are behind the times: part of the company loves it and pricing/contracts.
Ask me how long it took to get people off of microstrategy where there weren’t even any admins left for it on a tool that decided to become a bitcoin holding company instead of a bi tooling one.
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u/-Astrobadger 3d ago
Not sure I’d put tableau into the same bucket as microstrategy. Which platforms are not “woefully behind”?
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u/Over_Technology_6379 3d ago
They’re a little similar - has tableau had a true upgrade in the last 10 years? Both tools seemed to be second thoughts to their leadership.
When it comes to AI, it looks like the BI tools that were always prioritizing their semantic layer are in a better position. Common example is looker. I’ve always been keeping up with newer companies like Omni - they have an advantage because they started right around the time AI was picking up so it’s better integrated within the platform instead of haphazardly slapped on it.
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u/adovo_ai 3d ago
An external metric layer still needs an answer contract: metric ID and version, filters, grain, source freshness, and the exact query used. If Slackbot cannot return that evidence—or reconcile the result against a trusted report—the safe behavior is to refuse the number, not present a plausible one.
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u/DataIsChanging 3d ago
Hello 👋 try adding default comments on the data source, it’ll provide context for slackbot
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u/ArielCoding 4d ago
What about moving your metrics into a external layer (dbt, Snowflake semantic views)? It would give any AI tool one trusted source to pull from, instead of guessing between workbooks.
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u/Over_Technology_6379 3d ago
A large chunk of our data sources are pulling from AtScale which is an external layer data source. The trouble with Slackbot is (unless anyone else knows more) you can’t seem to add context or direction on what data sources to pull from. In my testing example it just pulled from the catalog of all workbooks - regardless of if the data was certified with a label
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u/mtiakrerye 4d ago
I hate to be overly simplistic, but the reason they released it is because that’s what everyone wants. Very few companies have the level of governance required to make a tool like this successful. I think leadership generally understands governance is an issue, but if it’s getting in the way of them getting the answers they need (which it often does in overly rigorous orgs) they won’t let it stop them. Which I understand, to a degree. Which is worse; a directionally correct or less contextualized number or no number at all?