Let me show you how you can enable and use the exciting
Copilot AI technology in Power BI.
We're going to cover three steps in this video, starting with
step one, how to enable Copilot AI inside Power BI. Then in Step
2, we'll take a look at how you can use the Copilot technology
to write help you write Dax Measures, and 3rd, we'll share
some final thoughts on what this could mean for the future of
Power BI professionals.
I'm always saying and even though now I'm a Microsoft MVP
and have trained thousands of people from all over the world
in Power BI, I started as a non techie business user. Perhaps
quite like you, lost and a bit overwhelmed. So now it's my goal
to make tech easy for the non techie. So make sure to
subscribe and click that bell.
Let's start at step one, enabling Copilot inside Power
BI. Now, first thing I want you to try is just click on the
Quick Measure icon inside Power BI and see if this pops up. If
it does, then well, lucky you because you already have Copilot
enabled. Now, if you don't see this, then we're going to show
you exactly what you need to do step by step. All right, so.
First thing you need to make sure is that you are signed into
the Power BI Desktop. Now you also want to open a model of
something with your data. You would especially need that to be
able to try the Co pilot functionality. If you like, you
can download the sample file they're working with here on
learnpowerbi.com. Download all right, then inside your Power BI
Desktop you'll go to file.
You'll go to Options and Settings and here find the
preview features right there. So click on that and in this one
make sure that the Quick Measure Suggestions is turned on now. If
it is unchecked, make sure you check that box and hit OK You
may have to restart Power BI Desktop.
Now if after this you still do not see the Copilot experience,
then this may be admin settings that need to be changed. If you
are lucky enough to have admin permissions in your Power BI
tenant, then I'll show you the steps you need. Otherwise you
may need to share this video and the steps with the person who is
the administrator in inside your organization. You know what they
say is not just about what you know, it's who you know. So hey,
stay friends with your Power BI admin.
So as the administrator, you want to go to powerbi.com, sign
in and click the gear icon and launch the admin portal. Inside
the admin portal, just search for Quick Measure, Quick
measure. If I can type that Quick measure suggestions inside
the tenant settings and here you're going to find two
settings. Now the first one.
You do need to turn on which is to allow quick measure
suggestions and as you can see this is enabled for my tenant
Now the next one is. If your geography is outside of the US
then you may also need to turn this on for this functionality
to work. After that you should see the Copilot feature enabled
inside the Power BI desktop. Let's see how we can use this
new functionality.
All right, now before we even get started, I'm pretty sure as
you would see when we run the demo, is that you still need to
understand the Power BI concepts and the core concepts, right? So
for example, Power BI modeling if you have a crappy model.
AI can perhaps help you put lipstick on a pig, but I'm sure
that's not what you want. So make sure you have a good
understanding of the Power BI core concepts, especially how to
design the model. And here of course, we have a simple model
with Sales and Budget as the data table, and we have the
lookup tables. Now I'll admit that when I was trying out Power
BI.
I did seems to struggle with it a bit or maybe it was Copilot
struggling, one of us was struggling, but I'll walk you
through. So I think it's a pretty clean model and frankly
in real life scenarios I have built and maintained models
which were far more complicated than this. There could be models
which have 50 plus tables and sometimes the data isn't clean
and you know gets cleaned over time. But it can be pretty
messy. I mean this one is really straightforward and simple.
So I started off with something really simple. I wanted to find
the total sales, so total sales and I try to generate the
measure and all right, it worked. It's great. So it gave
me the spinning wheel for a while there, but it looks good.
And let's add this so I'm going to click.
The add button over here, So again, it gives you kind of a
preview. It gives you the DAX measure and then it gives an
option to add. And then of course it populates the formula
bar and you can make changes to it if you like. So we're going
to call it total sales and we're going to differentiate it. We're
going to say AI. So these are the AI measures.
I'm also going to put this in a separate folder of its own. All
right, so I have moved it to its own folder, and let's add this
to our simple card display here to see what the value is shown.
Let me filter that to a specific year. All right, so I filtered
it to a single year. Now I'll say that here I was a little
surprised because I had my.
A sales report earlier and for the same year I had a different
amount and I realized that when I had set total sales and what I
meant was total was to sum it up, I now can see that it
actually went to the.
Total sales amount, which in my model is actually sales plus
tax. That's not what I intended. But again that's the kind of
thing AI and I think that's the approach and guidance Microsoft
is taking is that there's always kind of human oversight. So it's
not that's AI generates something and it's just consumed
by everybody that needs to be somebody who has the business
expertise and the technology expertise.
Really, I feel that that's where the future is going to be at
these boundaries and intersections of business and
technology. I think that's going to be a really exciting place to
be operating from and very rewarding as well in terms of
money. So, yeah, so all right, so let's come back here and I'm
going to try something different and I'm going to say some sales.
Let's see what it does for that.
So, all right. So for that, it actually picked up my other
formula which I've already defined. I'm going to try it one
more time and I'm going to give it the Sales amount column. So
some Sales amount and well, that's more like it. That's kind
of what I was looking for. So let's add this to our model and
we'll add this to our display as well. So there we go. And this
does match with.
You know the number that I was getting in this report? It is
essentially the same measure. But let's get a little bit
fancier here. Let's try something more. Let's try some
sales amount for previous year. Let's see how it tackles that
one. All right, it's back. And it looks like a pretty clean
measure.
So we'll go ahead and add it. Now one thing that I noticed,
which is really cool, that notice that as I'm zooming this
in, it's also zooming in the display here. That is so cool.
All right. So we have this and we're going to call it the AI
generated sales prior year. Okay, let's add that to the
display. And again, so far it's matching up beautifully with the
human intelligence.
So we have that okay, let's push this a little bit more And here
what I had created was a simple measure which shows sales as the
percentage of full year, right. So 404,000 in January, that is
5% of the full year. So let's go back to Co pilot AI and we'll
say some sales amount as.
Percentage of full year, Okay. Let's look at the measure and
it's no, I don't think this is going to give us what we want.
It's saying some of that and then Max of the calendar year,
let's try to rephrase that. So that didn't work.
Sum Sales Amount as percentage of Sales Amount for full year.
Let's try that. All right. So sum X over the sales table
divides Sales Amount by the sum of the year. You're summing up
the year, so clearly I'm having some trouble with it. So now.
Of course, this doesn't mean much. Copilot is really, really
new and we're just starting to scratch the surface. So just
because it doesn't work right now, it doesn't mean that, oh,
you know, we shouldn't worry about it, in fact. So let's talk
about. I had said that I would share my thoughts about the
future of Power BI professionals in the end.
All right, so let's talk about the future now. Just because the
last part of the demo didn't seem to work well doesn't mean
that you get to ignore it and say, ah, it's just gimmicky.
It's just, yeah, I can ignore it. It's just a bad. It's just
passing phase. It's not this is big. And trust me, I was the
same way. I was totally ignoring. And I'm like, yeah,
it's just whatever, I've heard this before. This is real.
This is real. And I started to pay attention when the people
that I really look up to, the coaches have guided me
throughout my journey, especially since leaving
Microsoft and starting my own business. They started talking
about this stuff and they started telling me that this is
game changing. So yeah, you can't ignore it and yeah, you
should pay attention now.
So yeah, you can't ignore it, but I think the other emotion
that comes up is fear. Say, Oh my God, am I going to lose my
job? Let's talk about that. So if you followed me for a while,
if you've gone through my Power BI tutorial, the 60 unit
tutorial on YouTube, or if you've gone through my learned
Power BI training program, then you know that I talk about core
concepts and that doesn't change. Again, a I for the near
future is not going to be.
That robust run the world, right? It's always going to have
human involvement and human oversight, and if anything is
going to be even more important and it's going to need even more
kind of special expertise. So yeah, humans are not going to be
redundant.
And the core concepts are more important than ever. You cannot
have a crappy Power BI model and expect AI to do magic on that.
The cleaner your model is, the more best practices you're
following, the more AI can help you, right? So the core concepts
are really important. And again, check out my tutorial or check
out my training program if you want to dive deeper into that.
Now the second part, now again, if you've been calling me for a
while, there's another thing that I talk on and on about,
which is that you should not build your career on the
foundation of tech. Tech is like a sand dune, right? You, you
shouldn't be building your career on that. And as I
mentioned in the video, I think the opportunity is going to be
at the intersections and somehow I was, it got me thinking about.
My vacation to Hawaii, so where the islands meet the sea, right,
that is the intersection, that's where you see the beautiful
corals. It's, it's alive and it's full and I think that's
what we're going to see in this exciting world that we are going
towards, right. So with that intersection of you know, kind
of the business and the human and all that stuff and
technology.
So yeah, so the lesson here is, and I've been seeing this for a
while and it's been true for a while, AI is just going to am it
up. It's going to just make that feature come to us faster, which
is you cannot build a career.
On tech and tech alone, you got to marry it with a business
niche. If you want to, you know, hear more from me about that,
then I would highly recommend you check out my Power BI
Consultant Launchpad series which talks about how you can go
on this path and go with this approach to create a successful
career and a life for freedom.
We'd love to hear how you are looking forward to or have you
been exploring Copilot or other AI technologies and what your
experience has been, so leave that in the comment below. I'll
see you in the next video. Until then, power on.