At Salesforce, our Analytics team is empowering millions of Trailblazers with a complete set of analytics capabilities — from basic reports and dashboards, to line of business apps, to AI-powered predictions and explanations. And today, I’m excited to share we’re expanding the capabilities of our Einstein Analytics platform with Conversational Queries, further simplifying how business users interact with their data. Now, with Conversational Queries, users can type phrases related to their data — such as “show me top accounts by annual revenue” or “rank accounts decreasing by annual revenue and billing country” —  and instantly view answers in automatically configured dynamic charts.

With Conversational Queries, any business user can explore and get answers from their data by simply typing a question.

Analytics is all about asking questions that lead to actionable insights — using data to understand what’s happening in your business and determine where to refocus sales efforts, how to increase pipe, or how to better serve customers. You have questions about your business every day, and the answer to one question may lead to two more questions, and two more questions after that. Traditionally, the process of creating charts has taken an average of 12 clicks and required a deeper understanding of chart building — how to create filters and what measures should go on each axis. Available today in beta, Conversational Queries offers a new way to explore data and get answers to questions faster, eliminating clicks and the training required to create and drill down into charts.

Here’s how it works:

• Start with a common word or two, and Einstein Analytics provides relevant suggestions that you can accept or edit as you type in the question. Once you ask a question, Einstein Analytics understands what you’re asking in relation to the data you have, and suggests the best way to visualize the answer. For example, if you want to see your top ten deals by region, Einstein Analytics will dynamically display your data in a bar chart to easily show “ranking.” Then, you can scroll through other design options in the Suggested Charts panel to instantly change the visualization based on your needs. You may decide to present this query in a map format, since it is looking at deals by location. 
  

• A visual history of all the questions you asked during your exploration session make it easy to rewind and find the question or chart that was most helpful. Long gone are the days of tinkering with data, only to forget the exact query that you wanted to focus on. After a series of questions, you may remember your second question was the one you wanted to share with the team — and you can now easily go back through your conversation with your data to find it.

• And of course, thanks to analytics being native on the Salesforce platform, all of these capabilities are easily actionable and shareable.

Rick Nania, Director of CRM Operations at Active International and an Analytics Trailblazer who is using the product in beta, is excited to see the benefit in the conversational UI. “Conversational Queries is going to be a huge game-changer in the AI and BI space. Having the ability to ask questions and gain key insights into our data just by typing or speaking a few words is amazing. I was impressed with the ability to get suggestions just by typing in a few letters and seeing other possible questions to ask- no data scientists required.”

These advancements with non-technical, conversational language allow anyone to ask a series of follow-up questions of their data, without waiting in the queue for a data scientist. We’re making the analytics experience faster and more natural, taking one more step in the direction of truly self-service data exploration. Conversational Queries will inspire greater interaction with data, which will translate to more, smarter decisions for every user.