Microsoft Fabric – a new Era of AI

I must admit that this slogan didn’t really speak to me at first when Microsoft unveiled Fabric. AI has always sounded like some kind of runic magic used only by wizards, with no concrete use case for mere mortal like me, who does not master the subtleties of this divinatory art called Data Science. I was afraid that one of the strengths of Microsoft Fabric would not really appeal to someone like me.

And by Odin’s beard, how wrong I was.

Although Microsoft Fabric obviously also includes the perfect little diviner’s toolkit in its Data Science experience, it has also introduced a major innovation: Copilot – a new tool that uses the power of Generative AI to assist you in your daily tasks.

Today, I would like to focus this article on the use cases that Copilot brings to Power BI and why companies should consider it.

The warriors of Asgaard : key roles in any clan

Meet Liv, Olaf, and Knut, members of the Asgaard clan.

The challenges of Liv, Olaf and Knut

Liv, Olaf, and Knut, although they all benefit from Power BI, face different challenges.

Liv, our Power BI artisan, is overwhelmed with a mountain of requests from clan members. Her desk is overflowing with paper sheets, each representing a business demand. As a result, she is forced to prioritize and focus only on the most urgent and important engravings

Olaf, our guardian of finances, feels that he does not know the tool well enough and only scratches the surface. His experience remains rather limited and the majority of his reports simply display data in a table or matrix, because that is ultimately what he knows best. He thinks that if he had better knowledge, he could better use all the features to leverage its full potential.

Knut, our merchant, is often frustrated because he is dependent on the availability of rune smiths and they do not always have the bandwidth to build him an engraving as quickly as desired. He would like to gain autonomy and create the simplest reports himself. Sometimes he is not even sure that his ideas are the right ones, so he would have liked to be able to explore, adopting the concept of fail fast, which encourages rapid experimentation and learning from failures to quickly improve. By trying things on his own before requesting a bigger project, Knut can avoid wasting meaningful resources, money, and time from rune smiths.

Copilot for Power BI: A gift from the gods

The gods heard the prayers of Liv, Olaf, and Knut and offered them Copilot, a divine guide to help them in their quest for wisdom and prosperity.

Copilot for Power BI comes in the form of a simple chat, which allows us to converse with a sage to help us in our various reporting tasks. At the moment of writing, some of its capabilities include:

• Describing a semantic data model (previously known as a dataset)
• Creating a new page in a report
• Summarizing a page
• Create a DAX measure

What is very interesting is that Copilot does not act like a mysterious oracle. We are free to take the reins and edit something, and why not hand over the torch to Copilot for the next tasks. It acts as a guide, but we remain the leader of the expedition and have control.

Thanks to Copilot, Knut, who didn’t know much, is able to create simple reports that allow him to be more efficient in his work. This also allows him to explore certain avenues and see if larger projects could make sense or not. Of course, he will always need Liv for more complex engravings, but he now feels more autonomous, and who knows, maybe he will dare to take the step and go further by improving the engravings generated by Copilot?

Olaf discovered that using Copilot allows him to learn more about Power BI. No more monotonous engravings with a dozen pages containing tables and matrices without adding real added value. Copilot gives him inspiration for visuals that he would not have dared to use. It also allows him to realize the richness of Power BI’s features to facilitate navigation and the discovery of new insights. And since Copilot works transparently, Olaf is able to see what has been generated, understand it and reproduce it himself later on.

Although Copilot has nothing new to teach Liv, she can only be satisfied with the time saved that this gives her with the rise in autonomy of the clan members. Also, it is always more pleasant to start with a sketch and refine it rather than starting from a blank page, Copilot therefore allows her to carry out the trivial steps of engraving design and allows Liv to focus her talent where she really adds value and be more productive.

The benefits of Copilot

In summary, the advantages of Copilot are as follows.

Empower End Users
Allows clan members to create reports and evaluate possibilities for larger initiatives without relying only on skilled developers.

Uplevel Skills
Helps clan members to learn, discover new features, and step out of their comfort zone.

Supercharge Productivity
Allows Viking developers to focus on more complex tasks where their talent adds value.

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With Microsoft Fabric, we have definitively entered a new era of AI. The platform natively and smoothly integrates AI into the whole solution, providing a seamless experience for users.