Key Power BI Insights from Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2021

The Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2021 was held as a digital event experience for executives, developers, and key users. Experts from Microsoft conducted 80+ sessions about Microsoft ecosystem of Business Applications. If you missed watching them, we are covering here the key insights from the event about Power BI and its future.

Rapid growth in the number of Power BI users

Power BI is now in its sixth year and usage continues to skyrocket up — growing close to triple digits as you can see in actual monthly active usage curve below.

Source: Microsoft

Power BI vision and roadmap

Microsoft has made dozens of announcements at the Business Applications Summit, but there are four major ones that we wanted to call out.

Announcing Automated Insights

Automated Insights combines all Power BI AI functionality ranging from anomaly detection to smart narratives and the decomposition tree into a single end-to-end experience directly catered to your needs. When you open a report, Automated Insights runs behind the scenes and surfaces insights that need your attention. Automated Insights is coming to Power BI later this year.

Source: Microsoft

Announcing Insight to Action with Power Automate

Microsoft has now brought Power Automate to the Power BI canvas—so you can author and kick off a business process using Power Automate’s 300+ connectors.

Source: Microsoft

This feature is more than just a refresh of Power BI dataset. This is far more powerful. You can have a button in Power BI that triggers a flow in Power Automate, and then you can access Power BI data from there and do actions based on those. This is a massive feature that can be helpful in heaps of automation on data-related scenarios from Power BI. This feature is available right now, and you can use it.

Announcing Goals in Power BI

Goals in Power BI are new objects in the Power BI service that helps with data-driven analysis based on KPIs and scorecard.

Source: Microsoft

Other than that, there is seamless integration with Microsoft Teams, which makes it easier to track your goals throughout the day and assign specific goals to yourself or colleagues. Goals also track the evaluation of a specific metric over time, so you can monitor how it evolves and if it is going the right way!

Announcing Data in Space

Customers with Data in Space will be able to bring Power BI to their physical world by using nothing more than their mobile device. Now you can “pin” Power BI reports to the objects in the real world that you want to measure—for example, telemetry coming out of the machines in your factory, sales results in your retail locations, and in the example below. Data in Space coming later in 2021 to Power BI Mobile.

Source: Microsoft

Inspiring stories of using Power BI

Explore real-world stories on how customers such as Walmart, T-Mobile, and Bayer are driving a data culture with Microsoft Power BI.

Watch featured sessions

• Power BI – Peek into the future: Vision & Roadmap
• Available capabilities, exciting new features, and the Power BI roadmap for later this year
• All sessions tagged with “Power BI”

In a nutshell, Power BI is up to many amazing upcoming features. We are excited to try new features and use refreshed Power BI combined with other Power Platform capabilities for fruitful projects on building advanced analytics and reports with our customers.

Photo source: Carlos Muza, unsplash.com

Based on materials from Microsoft: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-business-application-summit-recap/

Read more about the use of Power BI for business

Interested or want to know more about how you can benefit from Power BI Advanced Analytics?

Please, choose the office and contact us here.

Read and follow us on LinkedIn.

Next