Improving (formerly Imaginet) employees attended the Microsoft M365 Conference Las Vegas in early May and witnessed some amazing demos of Microsoft 365 CoPilot in Power BI. The idea that you can use natural language to create Power BI reports and data visualizations from a data model without any technical report-building skills is a game changer. Scenarios included, “Show me revenue trends by quarter for the last 5 years”, or “Why was profit down in Q1 of 2022?”. CoPilot can translate your words into a Power BI query, build the appropriate reports, perform data analysis, and deliver the results in an easy-to-understand visual report. Overall, the functionality is very impressive and should empower a lot more business users to interact with data to form meaningful insights.
Impact of Copilot
Improving provides Data Engineering and Analytics services to a lot of organizations across North America. We are commonly contacted to help create a Power BI report or visualization. Often, our client has started with Power BI and then hit some obstacle that is preventing them from progressing in their reporting. Almost 100% of the time, our clients don’t have a report writing problem, they have a data model problem. That is, they don’t have the appropriate data model to enable the report they are trying to write. Often they have a skilled Analyst who has patched together data from multiple reports in Excel but that Excel sheet has reached the end of its usefulness as a data model (and is getting very laborious to maintain). Our Data Engineering team can build the appropriate data model, that is automatically updated and allows their Analysts to create new reports and dashboards.
It appears that CoPilot will remove the need to be highly skilled at creating Power BI reports. Natural language queries will make report building more accessible to business users who have never used Power BI. The caveat here is that you must have a data model that contains the appropriate data artifacts, organized in a manner that allows CoPilot to analyze and build your report.
How to Prepare for Copilot
Organizations that want to adopt CoPilot for report building can prepare by looking at their current data sources and building out meaningful data models. We can help with the Data Engineering of disparate data sources, or by adding structure to data lakes or other blob store data repositories. You can contact us to set up a free consultation about your specific needs.
