Demystifying Power BI Copilot

In the dynamic landscape of data-driven decision-making, organizations are increasingly turning to robust tools to extract meaningful insights and drive strategic actions. Microsoft's Power BI stands tall as a game-changer, offering a suite of unique capabilities that empower businesses to harness the full potential of their data. Copilot has become an immortal feature.

Microsoft has kept the entire technical community engaged with exciting launches such as #Fabric and #AzureOpenAI over the last two years. #Copilot is likely to remain a buzzword for at least the next two years, until Microsoft surprises us with another innovative launch.

Last year, I had an opportunity to present a session titled "Data Driven Story Telling using Power BI" to a broader Global Data Architect community showcased some of the advanced Analytics capabilities of Power BI.

Even before Copilot became widely known to the external world, Power BI was already equipped with numerous exciting features such as Q&A, Smart Narratives, Quick Insights, Text Analytics, and the Analyze feature. As you progress through this blog, you'll come to appreciate that Power BI has served as a fundamental stepping stone for introducing some of Copilot's finest capabilities. This blog will delve into the evolution of Power BI, examining its features and functionalities both before and after the introduction of Copilot.

Power BI Evolution/Journey

Microsoft launched its first self-service BI tool, "Power Pivot," in 2010 as an Excel add-in, empowering users to perform advanced data modeling and analysis within Excel. This marked the beginning of more robust data handling capabilities. Following this, Power View was introduced as part of SQL Server 2012, providing interactive data visualization capabilities. Initially relying on SharePoint 2010, it was also introduced as an Excel 2013 add-in for sharing and presenting reports.

In 2015, Microsoft unveiled Power BI, a cloud-based business intelligence platform. Power BI Desktop, a standalone application, seamlessly integrated the capabilities of Power Pivot and Power View, offering advanced data modeling and interactive data visualizations. Power BI Office 365 facilitated the online publication and sharing of reports in the cloud. The introduction of Power BI Pro in 2015, Power BI Embedded in 2016, and Power BI Premium in May 2017, as a subscription-based service, further enriched the collaborative and sharing aspects of the platform.

I was fortunate to work on the entire Power BI journey.

Power BI before Copilot

There are numerous advanced analytics capabilities in Power BI - Decomposition Tree, Quick Insights, Column Distribution/Profile/Quality, Performance Analyzer, Smart Narratives, Power BI Report Page ToolTip, Key Influencers, Analyze Feature, Story Telling using Power Point LIVE, Text Analytics/Key Phrase Extraction, Custom Visualization etc.,

Let's delve deeper into some key features aligned with Copilot.

• Quick Insights Quick Insights is a fantastic feature in Power BI that allows you to automatically explore your data and find hidden insights within it. With just a few simple steps, you can harness the power of Power BI to discover trends, anomalies, and correlations in your data that might otherwise be hard to uncover. When you right-click on a dataset, report, or visual and select Quick Insights, it automatically generates numerous insights based on the data and built-in AI.

• Smart Narratives It provides a Quick summary of visuals and reports, delivering innovative insights tailored to address key takeaways, pinpoint trends, and adjust language and format for a specific audience. It is presented as a distinct feature in the tool list, providing quick summaries or notes based on the selected visual, slicer, or filter. Its user-friendly interface makes it particularly effective for storytelling.

• Q&A Feature This feature was introduced in Power BI in July 2013 even before Copilot was born. This feature allows users to ask natural language questions about their data, uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to generate visualizations or reports in response to those queries. It's a powerful tool for interactive data exploration and analysis. One particularly interesting aspect that I find valuable for customer presentations is the ability to start typing a natural query, and even before completing the query, you can see a report or visual generated in a fraction of seconds.

• Analyze feature This feature helps to explain increases, decreases, or unusual distributions in visuals, and get fast, automated, insightful analysis about your data. Right-click on a data point, select Analyze > Explain the decrease (or increase if the previous bar was lower), or Analyze > Find where this distribution is different. Then the insight is displayed in an easy-to-use window.

• Key InfluencersThis is a separate visual available in the tools designed to assist you in comprehending the factors influencing a metric of interest. It analyzes your data, ranks the significant factors, and presents them as key influencers. This tool is valuable for analyzing metrics with impacts that contribute to increases, decreases, or highlight important trends.

• Performance AnalyzerThis feature is exclusive to Power BI Desktop and proves instrumental in analyzing the performance of your report elements, including DAX and visuals. The Performance Analyzer allows you to observe and log metrics, gauging the performance of each report element during user interactions. This capability is particularly useful for fine-tuning the performance of your reports.

• AI Capabilities All the features I shared above are just a glimpse; Power BI encompasses a multitude of advanced capabilities, including Azure Machine Learning, Text Analytics, Vision, and more. If you are an ardent fan of Power BI, I urge you to explore all the Advanced Capabilities of Power BI before exploring Power BI Copilot.

Power BI after Copilot

At the recent Ignite 2023, Microsoft unveiled several Copilot offerings spanning the Microsoft family of products. In this blog, we'll delve into specific Power BI Copilot capabilities to explore their functionalities and benefits.

The advanced capabilities discussed in the previous sections, such as Smart Narratives, Key Influencers, Quick Insights, Analyze capability, and notably the Q&A feature, served as the foundational elements for the new Power BI Copilot capabilities. These features are extended and now available as part of the Power BI Copilot.

Power BI Copilot is offered in 2 versions - Power BI DAX Copilot and Power BI Report Copilot. Prior to using Power BI Copilot, certain prerequisites and settings need to be configured in the Admin portal. Refer to the Microsoft documentation.

Power BI DAX Copilot

This is available only in Power BI Desktop version. DAX Copilot assists in the automatic generation of DAX queries or functions based on your specific requirements. This accelerates the development process for your team, enabling quick creation of complex DAX functions.

Power BI Report Copilot

Let's begin with report creation. Using the same Revenue Dashboard featured in all my examples above, Copilot transforms the look and feel of the dashboard, highlighting notable differences.

Use Narratives

Similar to the Smart Narratives feature, you can create narratives to the entire Dashboard.

You have the ability to create different prompts, allowing exploration of the same dashboards with varying views, customer segmentations, and dimensions.

For Example, you can try this prompt.

Create a Dashboard with good looking visuals. This would give you different options with the usecases and KPIs. Here are some of the Dashboards created by Copilot. Have fun exploring these capabilities.

Synonym suggestions

An essential step in optimizing the Q&A visual for better comprehension of natural language inputs and delivering higher-quality answers is to include synonyms for data in your model. By explicitly adding synonyms, you inform Q&A about the fields and tables associated with specific words or phrases, including domain-specific language.

In Conclusion, regardless of your role, I encourage you to explore these capabilities of Copilot. As highlighted in the earlier sections of my blog, I trust you'll recognize that Power BI has played a pivotal role in paving the way for some of Copilot's most impressive features. They can prove invaluable in all your customer demos.

Keep learning! Keep winning!