Tableau is evolving into Tableau Next, an AI-infused agentic service that taps into the advanced data cloud technology developed by Salesforce, Tableau’s parent, and combines it with the ease-of-use and elegance of Tableau. 

PAG’s Chris Williams is one of the world’s foremost practitioners in the Tableau Next arena.  While Director of Customer Analytics at a Fortune 500 company, he initiated one of the very first implementations of Tableau Next.  By collaborating with the experts at Salesforce, he enabled that company to create a pioneering instance of Tableau Next for its data. 

Now, folks at that Fortune 500 company can ask conversational questions, and the answers are on-point.  That’s because under the hood, Tableau Next has been taught the company’s business rules and definitions.  If asked a question involving “revenue”, the agent understands whether the company measures performance by gross revenue, revenue minus returns and discounts, or some other metric. Everyone gets the same measure of “revenue.”

In recognition, Tableau featured Chris as a keynote speaker at its global 2025 technical conference where he delivered a live on-stage demonstration of the tool even though it was still in a beta formulation.

In the conference demonstration, Chris entered questions (see red arrow pointing to query box at the right bottom) and the agent provided initial answers (right top).  Importantly, the agent also provided suggested follow-on questions, shown in blue type above the query box.  One suggestion, for example, asked if the user wanted to create an alert based on rising Sales Risk Factors.

Now at PAG, Chris is advising multiple companies on their own adoption and exploitation of Tableau Next, enabling both faster insights and the creation of agents to implement those insights automatically, tirelessly, around the clock.

Tableau has invited him back to speak at the next national conference about the use cases for their latest innovations.

In addition, Chris is a highly skilled system architect who can orchestrate your business tools and underlying processes for best results.  He also is a Tableau Server administrator and Alteryx Server administrator, able to tie Tableau, Alteryx and many other leading Business Intelligence tools (such as into a smoothly functioning whole.