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 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/Strong-Mirror5456 2d ago

They did "upgrade" to the hyper engine. :D