Copilot comes to Power BI Quick Measures

This page has 0 threads | Add post

Blogs

Finding our blogs useful? Please consider helping us to share more!

Copilot comes to Power BI Quick Measures - but does it work?
You have to tweak Power BI a bit, but you can now generate quick measures using Microsoft's AI Copilot tool (which will be coming to all 365 applications over the coming months). In this blog we see if it works, and if your job is in danger ...

Posted by Andy Brown on 02 October 2023

In this blog

Turning Copilot on for quick measures
Adding a quick measure using Copilot
Tentative conclusions

You can now - with some tweaks, as shown below - generate quick measures in Power BI using Copilot. But does this work?

Turning Copilot on for quick measures

This Microsoft blog explains that quick measure suggestions for Power BI using Copilot are turned off outside the US by default, but you can enable them. To do this, your Power BI administrator needs to change your tenant settings to allow users' data to leave the UK (although of course you may not want this to happen):

Note that you also need to enable Q&A settings in the admin portal.

Adding a quick measure using Copilot

So I started off being really nice, and used the the names of tables and columns in our Create-a-Creature database, rather than any synonyms:

This is a fairly typical basic thing to want to do in DAX.

The answer looked correct at first glance, but when I added it to a table it quite clearly wasn't:

The figure for London should be 100%, and all other figures should be percentages of 9,498.

To see what's gone wrong, I looked at the formula:

Copilot has referenced the town called London, not the region.

However I only detected this mistake because a) I know the data and b) I know DAX.

I then spelt things out ... at which point Copilot gave up:

I thought I'd been helpful, but obviously not!

Tentative conclusions

Looking at Copilot like this has explained to me something I've wondered about for so long - why Microsoft have invested so much in training Q&A visuals:

Power BI has built up more and more functionality for defining synoyms in data models over the months and years.

The reason is that Microsoft need to be able to understand questions written in English, and map them onto your data model accurately so that the AI tool can generate useful answers.

I think that if you're prepared to spend some time setting up Q&A synonyms and linguistic relationships (a new feature introduced in this month's Power BI update), Copilot will help you generate DAX, saving a great deal of time. However, I still think you'll need someone who knows DAX to check (and possibly simplify in some cases) the measures generated. But perhaps the truth is that at this stage no one really knows how AI tools like Copilot will afffect all of our day-to-day jobs!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

This blog has 0 threads

Add a new post