Power BI and Generative AI: What You Need to Know

Generative AI writing, image creation and video creation has ramped up to new levels. It was only a matter of time before SaaS tools started integrating the power of this popular AI technology within their platforms.

Microsoft is no exception. There are two new features in Power BI that tap into Generative AI in different ways: Microsoft Fabric and Copilot. Here’s what you need to know about both, and how they impact your data.

Microsoft Fabric

In May 2023, Microsoft announced Microsoft Fabric - a new, all-in-one unified analytics platform that synthesizes data from Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI and uses AI technology to automate processes and improve output. Fabric is both an add-on to Power BI and an extension of Power BI. 

Fabric’s core components include:

• Data Engineering - Enables users to design, build, and maintain infrastructures and systems that enable their organizations to collect, store, process, and analyze large volumes of data.
• Data Factory - A modern data integration experience to ingest, prepare and transform data from a rich set of data sources (for example, databases, data warehouse, Lakehouse, real-time data, and more). 
• Data Science - Empowers users to complete end-to-end data science workflows for the purpose of data enrichment and business insights. You can complete a wide range of activities across the entire data science process, all the way from data exploration, preparation and cleansing to experimentation, modeling, model scoring and serving of predictive insights to BI reports.
• Data Warehouse - Provides customers with a unified product that addresses every aspect of their data estate by offering a complete, SaaS-ified Data, Analytics and AI platform, which is lake centric and open. 
• Real-Time Analytics - Reduces complexity and simplifies data integration. Quick access to data insights is achieved through automatic data streaming, automatic indexing and data partitioning of any data source or format, and by using the on-demand query generation and visualizations.
• Power BI - The world's leading Business Intelligence platform. It ensures that business owners can access all the data in Fabric quickly and intuitively to make better decisions with data.

Fabric also uses Microsoft’s Fabric with Azure OpenAI Service to allow users to create custom AI programs for their data. All of the above core components can utilize Azure OpenAI and Copilot AI.

Once launched, Fabric will be a billable service. For now, it’s still in preview mode through October 2023 and free to current Power BI users. You can activate the preview of Fabric in your Power BI portal by following these directions from Microsoft's Fabric launch post.

Copilot

Copilot is Microsoft’s answer to tools like ChatGPT, but with a Power BI spin. It offers more tactical generative AI services - simply type your query or desired report into the Copilot screen, and it will generate content for you. Examples include:

• Build new reports quickly - and with high levels of specificity
• Generate visualizations from data
• Analyze data 
• Analyze existing reports
• Create narratives from data
• Forecasting

The chat feature within Copilot makes it easy to describe what you want, and the tool will output it instantly. This saves time when creating simple reports, data visualizations, and other reporting features.

Both Fabric and Copilot add in exciting new features to Power BI to make it even more powerful.

Explore more resources on Fabric