Unlock Smart Data Insights with Power BI AI Features

To turn business information into actionable insights, Microsoft is increasingly promoting integration of Artificial Intelligence with Power BI. As we all are aware, Microsoft Power BI is a data visualization and business intelligence tool that collects raw data from multiple sources and transforms it into actionable insights.  This blog dives into the critical Power BI AI features and how these features are helping businesses succeed.  

But before understanding the integration of Power BI and AI, let’s have a quick look at what it is. Officially launched in 2015, Power BI was a breakthrough that replaced static reports to real-time reports and offered interactive cloud-based analytics.    

Its interactive dashboards and BI reports can be used on desktops and mobile platforms. Power BI AI features simplify data analytics and make it easier for BI developers and data analysts to build BI reports. With its flexibility and wide integration capabilities, Power BI has become one of the most popular solutions for Business Intelligence (BI).  

Here are the two critical components of Power BI.  

Power BI Desktop 

It is a primary tool that helps users create interactive dashboards and reports, connect to data sources, and transform and clean data. Being a free Windows application, Power BI Desktop supports real-time sharing and collaboration of data/reports. It can integrate with Server, Oracle, Azure, Dynamix, and Excel and make data management easier.     

Power BI Service 

It is a cloud-based platform that ensures publishing reports generated by Power BI Desktop. Power BI Service allows users to access and share reports in real-time, create dashboards by pinning visuals from reports, collaborate using workspaces, schedule data refreshes, and allow users to get automatic updates.     

Key components of the Power BI Service include workspaces, reports, datasets, data flows, and apps. When used collaboratively, Power BI Service and Power BI Desktop act as powerful platforms for collaboration. 

60% Power BI users have enabled AI visual options (Source: Microsoft). 

What is AI in Power BI?  

As the name suggests, Power BI integrates artificial intelligence capabilities into Microsoft’s business intelligence platform. 

The main purpose of this integration is to enable automated insights and predictive analytics and help users identify patterns and issues on a single dashboard. It converts complex data into easy insights for better decision-making. The core components of Power BI data analytics solutions are Power BI Service and Power BI Desktop. 

How can Power BI AI features make business easy? 

Copilot in Power BI 

This powerful Artificial Intelligence with Power BI features helps enterprises create reports, generate insights, and analyze data. It can create visuals, summarize data, explore models, write DAX, and act as your assistant. All you need to do is – use conversational prompts. It can integrate directly into Power BI Service and Desktop.   

Benefits of Copilot in Power BI: automatic report generation, create a summary visual, accelerated data analysis, and non-technical users can gain insight from data through Power BI copilot 

Use cases: Data analysis and modelling: write tough calculations or measures by writing prompts in easy language. 

Data exploration: you can ask any question to Copilot regarding what the transaction value is or what the cost of XYZ is. You will get an immediate answer to it. 

Natural Language Q&A 

It is another impressive Power BI AI feature. This allows users to ask questions in plain English rather than technical jargon. This AI capability of Power BI helps you simplify complex search queries into simpler plain text-based questions. Further, the Power BI intelligence transforms your queries into digestible visuals (i.e., graphs and charts).  

Benefits: This AI feature of Power BI helps you unlock self-service analytics that require minimal IT intervention for quick insights. 

Use cases: Sales professionals can use this feature and simply ask, “What were the total sales in the last quarter?” It gives you quick insights into sales, HR, and marketing data and speeds up decision-making, without requiring SQL/DAX. 

“Natural language processing (NLP) capabilities enable 59% of employees to query data using conversational prompts.” 

Key Influencers Visual 

It is another Power BI AI feature that helps you understand the reasons behind changes in outcomes. This tool uses statistical models to identify drivers for the target metric. 

Benefits: Saves guesswork and time through automated workflows, no coding or machine learning experience required 

Use case: Predict sales outcomes, identify customer satisfaction drivers, and find out factors that affect product performance.  

Decomposition Tree (AI-Driven Drill-Down) 

It is an interactive Power BI AI capability for detailed data exploration. The decomposition tree allows Power BI users to dive deeper into complex data models, using the power of artificial intelligence. 

For instance, imagine an HR team trying to derive a granule level report of few of the best performing employees out of a pool of thousands of employee performance records. Decomposition tree can help them simplify bigger data structures into macro level reports for simpler analysis and insights.

Anomaly Detection 

It is another AI-powered feature in Power BI that can help organizations identify unexpected rises, spikes, and patterns, as well as any other unexpected changes. 

Use cases: Helps monitor sales performance, enabling companies to track unexpected drops or surges. Secondly, it can be used to track patients’ vitals or hospital performance metrics. 

Benefits: identifies issues, reduces the need to manually check data, and finds fake operations or data at the initial stage.

AI-Powered Forecasting 

AI-power BI feature uses 

This AI Power BI feature uses built-in machine learning and Azure integration to evaluate historical data, identify patterns, and forecast future trends using these reports. Scalable predictions can help businesses transform data into actionable insights. 

Benefits: promote faster, automated forecasting; can be generated within Power BI visuals; identifies non-linear trends automatically. 

Use case: in the sales and revenue department, AI-powered forecasting can predict future sales using data from product, region, or channel. It improves budgeting and identifies upcoming revenue dips. 

Apart from these, AI in Power Query (Data Preparation) and Azure Machine Learning & AutoML Integration are Power BI Artificial Intelligence tools that help modern businesses achieve realistic targets more quickly. 

How does Power BI platform help businesses? 

Power BI benefits are not just limited to data visualization, report creation, and handling data analytics. Let us read about the way Power BI is empowering businesses thrive: 

Compelling data visualization: users can create unique visuals specific to their industry requirements.

Data integration from multiple sources: from Excel, PPT to IoT devices, Power BI software helps users to gather data from multiple sources. 

Security measures: Power BI ensures enterprise-grade security and ensures compliance with industry regulations for better collaboration. 

Fosters community and support: this platform promotes a large community of users to share tips and tricks and provides end-to-end support to help users understand the platform (training sessions, guides and more). 

What are the other benefits of Power BI AI features?

AI helps users forecast the business risk and what drives and suffices it; this leads to better decision-making.
It promotes workflow automation by reducing redundant tasks, so that data analysts can work majorly on bigger tasks rather than working on the micro-level.
Advanced image and text analytics help users understand customer sentiment and key phrases, enabling richer insights.
Power BI offers integration with MS Teams, Fabric, Azure, SQL, and Excel.
AI Power BI tools allow non-tech users to leverage AI without data science expertise.

Conclusion

To summarize, Power BI is a globally-acclaimed business intelligence platform for organizations of all sizes. As Power BI has introduced many AI tools, it has helped data analysts uncover insights faster with minimal data science expertise. With machine learning algorithms, Power BI with AI features has helped businesses move from static reporting to intelligent, prescriptive, and predictive reporting. 

From managing huge volume of business data to customizing dashboards that can go well with your business requirement, our experienced Power BI consultants go an extra mile to maintain data accuracy and minimize human error. If you want to learn how these modern tools can help your team, then Beyond Key’s Business Intelligence Consulting Services can help you with data analysis in a smarter way. 

Frequently Asked Questions: 

1. What are the names of Power BI AI features?  

AI features available in Power BI include: 

• AI Insights 
• Key Influencers 
• Anomaly Detection 
• Forecasting 
• Q&A natural language queries, and  
• AutoML, to name a few 

2. What is Copilot in Power BI, and how does it work? 

Copilot uses generative AI assistants to support users in summarizing data, generating DAX queries, gaining insights, boosting productivity, and creating reports with natural language prompts. Copilot quickly builds new reports, debug formulas, and understands data models better. 

3. Can Power BI AI features work with large datasets? 

Yes. Power BI features can enable advanced analytics in complex datasets in larger organization and scale to the size of an organization’s datasets.   

4. What industries benefit most from Power BI AI features? 

Power BI AI features can help industries such as manufacturing, logistics, finance, energy, retail, healthcare, and more. These intelligent tools can help these industries handle diverse datasets and generate actionable insights.  

5. Is Power BI AI replacing data analysts?
No. Power BI AI helps analysts automate repetitive tasks and generate insights, allowing them to focus on the bigger picture of the organization.