If you had to summarize the relationship between business leaders and data in just a couple of words, your best bet is simply to say, “It’s complicated.”
And it seems to be getting more complicated as time goes on.
Salesforce’s State of Data and Analytics 2025 report (registration required) found that confidence in data’s relevance to business objectives is down 18% from its 2023 report, and confidence in data accuracy is down 27% in the past two years.
The report’s findings suggest that data, in general, seems to put business leaders under pressure:
- 76% of business leaders feel increasingly pressured to back their arguments and claims with data.
- 57% feel in competition with their colleagues to prove their value with data.
- 76% of business leaders — including 83% of marketing leaders — say the rise of AI increases their need to be data-driven.
- 72% of business leaders feel their career trajectories are dependent on how data-driven they are — that is, their ability to use facts, metrics and data to drive decisions.
Fewer than half of the business leaders in the report said they can use data to drive action and decision-making, generate and deliver timely insights or effectively use data in their day-to-day work.
For this, the blame seems to rest, in part, with the tools at their disposal for accessing and interpreting data:
- 90% of business leaders say that direct access to the data they need within the programs and apps they use most (i.e., directly in the flow of work) would help them perform better.
- 86% say they’d use data more often if it were incorporated into their workflows.
- 85% think they’d be better at their jobs if they could ask their data questions using natural language, like they use with colleagues.
Dig deeper: How AI makes marketing data more accessible and actionable
Salesforce bets on AI agents for data analytics
Salesforce is investing heavily in agentic AI with its Agentforce platform. It believes AI agents capable of reasoning and acting independently can help improve the relationship between business leaders and their data.
To do that, Salesforce is bringing AI agents to its Tableau platform through a product called Tableau Next, which launched this week.
Tableau Next will help automate repetitive tasks like cleaning, transforming and visualizing data, the company said. It will also deliver better insights by autonomously detecting hidden correlations, outliers and trends.
Tableau Next will incorporate natural language summaries, visualizations and recommendations into users’ workflows to fill the gap between business leaders and data tools.
Tableau Next is now generally available to customers with the Tableau+ SKU. It includes five modules:
- Data Pro: An intelligent data prep assistant with smart suggestions for cleaning and changing data. Generally available in June 2025.
- Concierge: Delivers immediate, reliable answers to data questions with clear insights and recommended actions. Generally available in June 2025.
- Inspector: Proactive data monitoring and insights that continuously track your data for key changes, analyzes trends and predicts improvements. Generally available in 2025.
- Tableau Semantics: A semantic layer that provides Tableau Next and Agentforce with a unified understanding of business data. Tableau Semantics is now generally available.
- Marketplace: Where users can share and reuse data analysis components like data assets, connections, metrics, visualizations and dashboards. Generally available in 2025.
Dig deeper: How to promote data literacy in your marketing team
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