From July to September 2025, Tableau hosted the first-ever Tableau Next Hackathon, inviting participants worldwide to explore the future of analytics. Contestants received free access to Tableau Next’s newest capabilities — Concierge, Visualizations and Actions, Tableau Semantics, and Data Cloud — and competed for a share of the $45,000 prize pool, with winning projects featured at Dreamforce 2025.
At The Information Lab, our consultants embraced the challenge. We submitted five projects spanning healthcare, insurance, HR, pharma, and technical platform innovation. Each one demonstrates not only what’s possible with Tableau Next today, but also the opportunities it creates for organizations to transform decision-making with agentic analytics.
1. Clinical Trials Operations – Site Performance
How Tableau Next helps spot hidden risks in life sciences. This demo tackled one of the most pressing challenges in clinical research: poor trial site performance. By generating a realistic 18-month dataset with over 50,000 records, the team created a full Salesforce Developer Org environment to mimic real-world trials. Tableau Next with Agentforce transformed the experience: instead of manually combing through dozens of sites, users could simply ask, “Which sites are underperforming?” and immediately take action, from case creation to performance intervention.
2. AgentForce For All
Bringing Salesforce directly into Tableau Desktop, Server, and Cloud. Where most see Tableau Next as pulling Tableau into Salesforce, this project flipped the script: what if Salesforce could be brought into Tableau? Using the Authoring SDK pilot, the team connected Tableau Semantics and Agentforce to allow natural language queries and results to flow directly into Tableau Desktop — even saving new sheets for future dashboards. It’s a bold look at how extensible Tableau and Salesforce APIs really are, and a proof point that innovations once thought “impossible” are already within reach.
3. Auto Policy Boost Campaign
Aligning marketing and sales with real-time analytics. In the insurance industry, marketing sparks interest, but sales closes deals. This submission showcased how Tableau Next can bridge the gap between the two. Using Agentforce for semantic querying and Tableau’s visualization layer, the demo simulated end-to-end campaign tracking — from lead generation to territory manager follow-up. The result is an environment where both teams can collaborate on shared insights, driving measurable policy growth.
4. Tableau Next for HR: Better Decisions, Faster Hiring
Proving Tableau Next isn’t just for CRM and marketing data. This project reimagined HR analytics with Tableau Next. Using dummy data in Sales Cloud, the team adapted objects, built a semantic layer, and created dashboards to accelerate recruiting. Agentforce supported deeper analysis — from matching job postings to candidates, to spotting bottlenecks in the hiring process. The innovation shows how organizations can extend Tableau Next to non-traditional use cases, delivering faster hiring decisions and better workforce outcomes.
5. PharmaNext: The Next-Gen Pharma Analytics
A global, scalable solution for consistent insights. Inspired by UPSA’s real-world challenge, this project built an end-to-end Tableau Next solution that empowers pharma stakeholders with AI-driven insights. By cleaning and anonymizing data, configuring a robust semantic model, and validating with business units, the team delivered a sleek, standardized dashboard supported by Concierge. The result is a scalable model that ensures executives, managers, and analysts all work from a unified source of truth — eliminating fragmented analyses and accelerating decision-making.
What These Projects Prove
These five submissions highlight the versatility of Tableau Next: from clinical trials and insurance campaigns to HR hiring processes and global pharma analytics. The technology is already proving it can power AI-driven insights and actions across industries.
While Tableau hosted the hackathon, The Information Lab’s submissions underscore our role as a partner pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Our team’s hands-on work with Tableau Next and Salesforce shows how organizations can unlock faster, smarter, and more scalable decision-making.
Want to explore Tableau Next for your business? Contact us at info@theinformationlab.co.uk to learn how we can support enablement and solution development.