Last week I made an April Fools joke about Tableau's missteps on LinkedIn that seemed to strike a chord.

Then this happened:

-On Monday, Ridge AI emerged from stealth with $2.6M.

-On Tuesday, Golden Analytics launched with $7M.

Both founded by Tableau veterans. Both funded by the same investment group. Both built on the belief that AI can take analytics somewhere the current generation of tools cannot.

Francois Ajenstat spent three decades in analytics, including serving as Tableau's Chief Product Officer through its IPO and Salesforce acquisition. Ellie Fields spent over 12 years as a product and marketing leader at Tableau. These are people who loved the category enough to spend their careers building it and now they're rebuilding it.

Tableau did something genuinely hard - it made data accessible to people who couldn't code.

The next chapter will be making it accessible to the remaining tranche of people who never had the opportunity to learn how to build with BI tools.

This is the data democratization we've talked about for the last two decades. Worth watching both, links in comments.