INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
When Tableau was founded back in 2003, not many people were thinking about artificial intelligence to drive analytics and visualization, but
over the years the world has changed and the company recognized that it needed talent to keep up with new trends
Today, it announced it was acquiring Empirical Systems, an early stage startup with AI roots.Tableau did not share the terms of the
deal.The startup was born just two years ago from research on automated statistics at the MIT Probabilistic Computing Project
According to the company website, “Empirical is an analytics engine that automatically models structured, tabular data (such as
spreadsheets, tables, or csv files) and allows those models to be queried to uncover statistical insights in data.”The product was still
in private Beta when Tableau bought the company
It is delivered currently as an engine embedded inside other applications
That sounds like something that could slip in nicely into the Tableau analytics platform
What’s more, it will be bringing the engineering team on board for some AI knowledge, while taking advantage of this underlying advanced
technology.Francois Ajenstat, Tableau’s chief product officer says this ability to automate findings could put analytics and trend
analysis into the hands of more people inside a business
“Automatic insight generation will enable people without specialized data science skills to easily spot trends in their data, identify
areas for further exploration, test different assumptions, and simulate hypothetical situations,” he said in a statement.Richard Tibbetts,
Empirical Systems CEO, says the two companies share this vision of democratizing data analysis
“We developed Empirical to make complex data modeling and sophisticated statistical analysis more accessible, so anyone trying to
understand their data can make thoughtful, data-driven decisions based on sound analysis, regardless of their technical expertise,”
Tibbets said in a statement.Instead of moving the team to Seattle where Tableau has its headquarters, it intends to leave the Empirical
Systems team in place and establish an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Empirical was founded in 2016 and has raised $2.5 million.
