Fewer than half of business leaders say their data strategies are completely aligned with their business priorities — down 14 percentage points from 2023

---

A new Salesforce survey of more than 500 U.S. business leaders shows the stakes for data-driven decision-making are rising for businesses and their leaders. However, trust in the data that underpins these decisions is falling — and many leaders don’t feel equipped to find, analyze, and interpret the data they need in an increasingly competitive business environment.

Why it matters: Amid below-average rates of business confidence, an uncertain economy, and frequent headlines of cost-cutting, businesses and their leaders need more accurate and reliable insights to guide deliberate and agile decision-making. Yet less than half of business leaders say their data strategies — how data is collected, managed, stored, and accessed — fully align with their business priorities, representing a significant decline since 2023.

Agentic analytics offers a solution by unifying data and empowering AI agents to proactively deliver trusted, real-time insights to everyone, enabling data-driven decisions for everyone – even those who don’t consider themselves ‘data people’.

Southard Jones, Chief Product Officer of Tableau

Salesforce perspective: “There is an increasing amount of pressure on business leaders to use data in today’s hyper-competitive environment,” said Southard Jones, Chief Product Officer of Tableau. “Yet, fragmented enterprise data and complex analytics tools are common obstacles leaders face that can significantly hinder confident decision-making. Agentic analytics offers a solution by unifying data and empowering AI agents to proactively deliver trusted, real-time insights to everyone, enabling data-driven decisions for everyone – even those who don’t consider themselves ‘data people’.” 

By the numbers:

Increased Reliance on Data Coincides with Declining Confidence

Seventy-six percent of business leaders feel increasingly pressured to back their arguments and claims with data, and 57% feel in competition with their colleagues to prove their value with data — a sentiment that’s even more common at the executive and VP levels. 

AI is also a major factor driving data’s gravity: 76% of business leaders — including 93% of customer service leaders, 83% of marketing leaders, and 80% of human resources leaders — say the rise of AI increases their need to be data-driven.

Yet despite data’s critical and growing role, business leaders are less confident in various aspects of their data than they were when polled for Salesforce’s 2023 State of Data & Analytics study. For example, confidence in data’s relevance to business objectives is down 18%, and confidence in its accuracy is down 27%.

‘Non-Data People’ Risk Falling Behind as Data Literacy Becomes Table Stakes

It’s little surprise that 72% of business leaders feel their career trajectories are dependent on how data-driven they are — that is, their ability to use facts, metrics, and data to drive decisions. But 86% go a step further, saying their careers are reliant on how data-literate they are — their ability to use methods and tools to extract insights from data. This drive for data literacy is especially felt among those in sales (90%) and marketing (89%).

Yet despite 63% of business leaders needing to find, analyze, and interpret data on their own, 54% of them aren’t fully confident in their ability to do this. In fact, fewer than half of business leaders are sure they can use data to drive action and decision-making, generate and deliver timely insights, or effectively use data in their day-to-day work.

This lack of self-confidence in data literacy is particularly common among self-described right-brained business leaders — those who gravitate toward expressive and creative skills over math and logic — who represent 47% of respondents in a business environment that increasingly demands them to use critical thinking, data, numbers, and reasoning. While present across all departments, right-brained business leaders are overrepresented in fields like human resources, marketing, and sales — fields that, like others, are being transformed by AI.

Right-brained business leaders are 54% more likely to say they don’t know what questions to ask their data.

Agentic Workflow Analytics: The Turning Point for Data-Driven Decisions

Ninety percent of business leaders say that direct access to the data they need within the programs and apps they work in the most — in other words, directly in the flow of work — would help them perform better, and 86% say they’d use data more often if this were the case.

Beyond easy access in their most heavily used apps, business leaders are interested in a more conversational relationship with their data: 85% think they’d be better at their job if they could ask their data questions with natural language like they use with colleagues. 

This is the bread-and-butter capability of AI agents — software that can reason and act on its own. After seeing a definition of this revolutionary technology, business leaders were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the potential of agents to make data more accessible, provide more timely insights, reduce analysis paralysis, and even outperform their goals.

The customer view: John Lewis Partnership (JLP), the parent company of many major U.K. retail brands, uses Tableau Pulse to provide trusted, accessible, and real-time insights that help employees understand where they need to focus their efforts. With AI-driven insights, the company has improved internal processes and driven better decision-making around key metrics like inventory management and product availability.

Go deeper:

• Read the Tableau Next announcement
• Watch the webinar to learn how Tableau enriches Agentforce agents 

Methodology: Data was sourced from a double-anonymous survey of 552 full-time U.S. business decision makers at companies with at least 500 employees. Respondents had a seniority of director or higher and represented a variety of industries and roles, including marketing, customer service, sales, human resources, and finance. Research was conducted from March 12 through March 21, 2025.

Blog Article: Here