Power BI

by
Andrew Snodgrass

by
Andrew Snodgrass

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) service for creating and sharing reports, dashboards, paginated reports, and other analytics content and for building semantic models (formerly called datasets). Content is authored mainly in Power BI Desktop and published to workspaces on one or more back-end platforms—a Power BI service (Pro or embedded), a Fabric capacity, or the on-premises Power BI Report Server—which stores the report, refreshes its data, and controls access to it. Users reach content through the Power BI portal, mobile apps, Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps, and embedded applications.

Product: Power BI

Licensing: Power BI

Near-Term Updates and Roadmap (2026–2027)

Microsoft is expanding Power BI’s scope in 2026 to take on more of the business-definition layer for some of Microsoft’s AI tools. Power BI semantic models are now being used to ground Microsoft 365 Copilot answers, and agents can automatically author models and reports. The risk is that Power BI’s new AI features are on by default, which opens a new door for data exfiltration without providing time to establish proper governance.