Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming business intelligence and analytics. As AI capabilities advance, Power BI is integrating more AI into its platform to make data visualizations and dashboards more intelligent. Here’s an in-depth look at how AI is enhancing data visualizations in Power BI and delivering more value to organizations.
AI-Powered Visualizations in Power BI
Power BI offers a variety of AI-powered visuals that provide deeper insights from data:
Key Influencers Visual
The Key Influencers visual leverages AI to analyze relationships between columns in a dataset. It identifies the factors that have the greatest impact on a selected outcome/metric.
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This visual automatically surfaces key drivers behind changes in business metrics. It’s great for root cause analysis and focusing efforts on what matters most.
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The visual displays the key influencers as well as their impact direction and strength. I can easily understand the ‘why’ behind trends in the data.
Anomaly Detection Visual
The Anomaly Detection visual uses machine learning to detect anomalies and unusual patterns in time series data.
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It automatically finds unexpected spikes, dips or seasonal changes in metrics over time. This makes it easy to spot outliers and anomalies that warrant investigation.
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I can customize the sensitivity of the anomaly detection and control which data points are flagged as unusual. This visual adds a layer of intelligence to time series charts.
Decomposition Tree Visual
The Decomposition Tree visual breaks down time series data into trends, seasonality and residuals to aid analysis.
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It decomposes time series components like trend and seasonality that are hard to discern from looking at the raw data.
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Understanding these core components of time series data helps me analyze patterns and make more accurate forecasts. The visual displays an interactive hierarchical view of the time series composition.
Smart Narratives
Smart Narratives generate an automated narrative of key insights from a report page using natural language capabilities.
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Narratives explain the key takeaways from a page of visuals and describe what the data means.
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I can instantly get a quick, high-level summary of the most important insights in a report via auto-generated text, rather than having to interpret all the visuals myself.
Benefits of AI Visuals in Power BI
Integrating AI capabilities into Power BI visualizations provides a number of benefits:
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Deeper analysis – AI visuals help uncover deeper insights beyond just data presentation. Key influencers, anomalies, decomposition analysis create new understanding.
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Finding insights faster – Automated insights from smart narratives, anomaly detection and key drivers analysis significantly accelerates exploring data.
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Focus on what matters – Identifying key influencers, outliers and core components enables focusing on what’s important and deserves attention.
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Enhancing forecasting – Decomposition trees break down time series data in ways that drive better forecasting models and predictions.
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Augmenting human intelligence – AI visualizations enhance human decision making and analysis. They don’t replace people but allow us to leverage AI capabilities.
The Future of AI Visualizations
Power BI will continue adding more AI powered data visualizations. Some future capabilities may include:
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Predictive visuals that forecast future trends beyond current data
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Automated data lookups to enhance analysis
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Natural language querying of visuals to get quick answers from data
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Evaluating relationships between different visuals on a page
AI is rapidly advancing what’s possible with data visualizations. Power BI is leading the charge in integrating AI capabilities for smarter, actionable business insights. These AI visuals fundamentally change how we can explore and understand data. The future is bright when it comes to AI augmenting data visualization and analysis to drive better decision making.
