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“Artificial intelligence and generative AI have the potential to transform how strategists work by strengthening and accelerating activities such as analysis and insight generation while mitigating challenges posed by human biases and the social side of strategy.” – McKinsey.
In an era when artificial intelligence is reshaping the business ecosystem, companies are racing to use its potential—and investors are betting big on the tools leading this transformation. Giants like Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META), Google (GOOGL), and Amazon (AMZN) have already committed an estimated $125 billion to AI infrastructure and innovation in the first eight months of 2024 alone, according to a Yahoo Finance report. At the heart of this revolution lies a critical question: How can businesses turn this massive wave of data into actionable insights?
Enter Microsoft Power BI—a business intelligence powerhouse redefining analytics with cutting-edge AI features. While the market brims with BI tools, Power BI distinguishes itself by transforming raw data into dynamic visualizations and decision-driving reports, all while staying ahead of the curve through relentless innovation.
Since 2023, Microsoft has turbocharged Power BI with AI capabilities that feel almost futuristic. Features like Copilot, which streamlines report creation through natural language commands; AI Insights, offering predictive analytics with just a click; and advanced visuals that adapt to user behavior, are setting a new industry standard. These upgrades aren’t just incremental—they’re revolutionizing how teams uncover trends, forecast outcomes, and collaborate.
In this article, we’ll explore Power BI’s latest AI-driven tools and see how they empower users to build smarter dashboards, automate tedious tasks, and unlock insights that drive strategic advantage. Whether you’re a seasoned analyst or new to BI, discover how Power BI’s AI evolution can elevate your data game!
What is Copilot in Power BI?
Copilot is an AI-powered assistant that uses LLMs to help users with tasks across Microsoft applications.
Copilot was built to enhance productivity by automating repetitive tasks, generating content, providing insights, and assisting with data analysis. Its key features include natural language processing, content generation, data analysis, and task automation.
You can read the documentation here to get Copilot for Power BI running.
Key Features of Power BI Copilot
As a Power BI user, you can use Copilot to assist in writing DAX queries, simplify semantic model documentation, generate summaries of your semantic model, and guide you through the initial steps of report creation.
Additionally, Copilot can produce narrative visuals that encapsulate the key points of a page or an entire report and generate synonyms for Q&A, making it easier for report readers to locate the information they need.
According to the latest Microsoft documentation on Copilot for Power BI, the current features for Power BI users include:
Suggest content for a report
Imagine you’re trying to create a report, and you have your data, but you’re unsure what to work on with the data you have with you. At this point, you’re thinking of several things to do, but you need to create a report that will be useful to your users.
Copilot can help you start a new report by offering topic suggestions based on your data. When you choose this feature in the chat, Copilot analyzes your dataset and generates a report outline, complete with proposed pages. You can review these suggestions and decide which ones to create, making the report-building process faster and more intuitive.
Create a report page.
Before using Copilot capabilities in Power BI, your admin must first enable Copilot in Microsoft Fabric.
With just a few clicks, Copilot for Power BI can help you create reports for your analysis by helping you identify tables, fields, measures, and charts for your data. If you provide Copilot with a detailed, high-level prompt related to your data, it can create a report page for you, which you can further tailor and refine using the standard editing tools. Copilot enables you to jumpstart your report creation, significantly saving time and effort in the process.
Create a summary visual on the report itself.
With just a few clicks, Copilot for Power BI can help you generate a comprehensive summary of your entire report, specific pages, or even individual visuals you choose to highlight.
This feature allows you to quickly distill complex data into clear, actionable insights, saving you time and effort. Furthermore, you have the flexibility to tailor the tone and level of detail in the narrative by selecting from a range of suggested prompts or creating custom ones to suit your specific needs.
Whether you need a high-level overview or a deep dive into specific metrics, Copilot adapts to your preferences, ensuring the output aligns perfectly with your communication goals.
Write DAX queries
Imagine you’re doing your analysis on Power BI, and you’re trying to calculate or aggregate certain variables. But you’re unable to do this because you don’t know what DAX queries to write that can help you get this done. Copilot comes to the rescue here, helping you write complex or even simple DAX queries by just prompting it.
Let’s look at how Copilot can assist you in DAX Query View:
1. Natural Language to DAX Query: Simply describe what you need from your semantic model, and Copilot will generate the corresponding DAX query for you. You can also ask Copilot to modify an existing DAX query.
2. DAX Query to Natural Language: Request Copilot to explain the functionality of any DAX query in plain language.
3. Understand DAX Concepts: If you’re unfamiliar with a specific DAX function or need help identifying the right function for a task, Copilot can guide you through it.
This makes working with DAX more intuitive and efficient!
Ask Copilot questions about data in your model
Using the measures and columns in your data, Copilot empowers you to explore your data in innovative ways by assisting you in answering questions about your report and datasets. It intelligently analyzes your queries and cross-references them with the available data to determine if the answers can be derived from the existing report visuals. This capability not only streamlines the process of data discovery but also ensures that insights are grounded in the visualizations you’ve already created.
By bridging the gap between your questions and the visual representations of your data, Copilot enhances your ability to uncover hidden patterns, validate assumptions, and make data-driven decisions with confidence. This seamless integration of natural language interaction and visual analysis transforms how you interact with your data, making it more intuitive and impactful.
Add descriptions for semantic model measures
Most times, report authors are not the only ones who have access to the properties of a report, like the model, datasets, measures, and other properties. It’s important to always add a description of these properties to help other users understand what you’re doing.
With Copilot, you can add descriptions to your semantic model measures for people building reports from your semantic model to see the name and description of your measures, making the description property essential documentation.
Enhance Q&A with Copilot for Power BI
The Q&A visual and its natural language processing (NLP) capabilities operate independently of generative AI, relying instead on structured data and predefined logic to interpret and respond to user queries.
However, you can enhance the Q&A visual’s functionality by integrating Copilot for Power BI, which elevates its ability to understand and address user questions with greater precision and efficiency.
Copilot’s advanced AI-driven features complement the Q&A visual by providing more nuanced interpretations of natural language inputs, suggesting relevant follow-up questions, and refining responses to align with the context of the data
Future Developments for Copilot in Power BI
To make users better understand their data and do more insightful analytics using Power BI, there will be a Copilot feature that allows you to choose from standard prompts after launching Copilot or using the prompt guide in preview mode. A new option labeled ‘Answer a question about the data’ will be available.
Selecting this prompt will provide three suggested questions to help you explore your data. If none of these questions interest you, you can scroll up or use the prompt guide (book icon) to generate three additional suggested questions.
Additionally, authors can customize these suggested questions by configuring the Q&A setup in Power BI Desktop for a specific semantic model. This customization ensures that the suggested questions appear in both Copilot and the Q&A visual, enhancing the data exploration experience.
What will you be doing with any of these features? Let us know in the comment box.
