Austin Tableau User Group 08 Oct 2026

So I'm gonna talk to you just for a minute about making agents learn our business.

Um, I've spent a ton of time in Tableau Next, and then been excited as they brought, um, more context to the Tableau Cloud environment since that's mostly wh- where everybody lives and breathes.

And, um, just wanna share with you a few thoughts about how this can work and work well, um, as I've been trying to figure it out.

This is an excerpt.

I'm not gonna go through all the slides, but I have an excerpt, and I mostly wanna show you what the difference is of business preferences.

So they've integ-- For any one of you that haven't heard recently, they've integrated business preferences into Tableau Cloud.

It's one per dashboard, one document you can have per dashboard.

And while that's similar to what we do with Tableau Next, the Tableau Next, uh, business preference file is one per semantic model.

So for the whole model, it, it would read it for them.

This is one per dashboard.

And so I have a couple examples already queued up to-- just to save on time.

But let me, let me come back to this, and I'm gonna show you some things in person.

So, uh, this is my Tableau Next en-- one of my Tableau Next environments that I've been working with, and this is a set of guardrails and things that I put together for a, um, dashboard system.

It's a automotive manufacturing dataset, and you can kinda get a sense of the kind of things that would be allowed.

Now, for the Tableau Next environment, the amount of characters and the number of rules or guidelines you can offer is, uh, substantially larger.

This says thirty thousand characters.

I only needed about eighteen thousand to get the job done for this dataset.

But think of it like this.

Uh, this is not the mainline first thing you wanna do to help an agent understand your business.

It is actually like the final mile or the last mile because you wanna have things well labeled.

You wanna have descriptions.

For Tableau Cloud, that means in that default properties comment section, which you can autoload programmatically through an API.

Don't h-- Or you can download it from Tableau Next if you have a shared data source.

Um, there's lots of ways to automate that.

It's gonna be important to, to get real clear on that.

So I'm gonna talk to you just for a minute about making agents learn our business.

Um, I've spent a ton of time in Tableau Next, and then been excited as they brought, um, more context to the Tableau Cloud environment since that's mostly wh- where everybody lives and breathes.

And, um, just wanna share with you a few thoughts about how this can work and work well, um, as I've been trying to figure it out.

This is an excerpt.

I'm not gonna go through all the slides, but I have an excerpt, and I mostly wanna show you what the difference is of business preferences.

So they've integ-- For any one of you that haven't heard recently, they've integrated business preferences into Tableau Cloud.

It's one per dashboard, one document you can have per dashboard.

And while that's similar to what we do with Tableau Next, the Tableau Next, uh, business preference file is one per semantic model.

So for the whole model, it, it would read it for them.

This is one per dashboard.

And so I have a couple examples already queued up to-- just to save on time.

But let me, let me come back to this, and I'm gonna show you some things in person.

So, uh, this is my Tableau Next en-- one of my Tableau Next environments that I've been working with, and this is a set of guardrails and things that I put together for a, um, dashboard system.

It's a automotive manufacturing dataset, and you can kinda get a sense of the kind of things that would be allowed.

Now, for the Tableau Next environment, the amount of characters and the number of rules or guidelines you can offer is, uh, substantially larger.

This says thirty thousand characters.

I only needed about eighteen thousand to get the job done for this dataset.

But think of it like this.

Uh, this is not the mainline first thing you wanna do to help an agent understand your business.

It is actually like the final mile or the last mile because you wanna have things well labeled.

You wanna have descriptions.

For Tableau Cloud, that means in that default properties comment section, which you can autoload programmatically through an API.

Don't h-- Or you can download it from Tableau Next if you have a shared data source.

Um, there's lots of ways to automate that.

It's gonna be important to, to get real clear on that.