Amir Netz, Technical Fellow at Microsoft and CTO of Microsoft Fabric, discusses how business intelligence has evolved, Power BI and Fabric, building and deploying ML models, benefits of Fabric's auto-integration and auto-optimization, Copilot capabilities, and future developments.
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Quick takeaways
The shift in business intelligence (BI) towards a more business-driven approach has empowered business analysts to use user-friendly tools like Power BI designed for easy use by Excel and PowerPoint users.
Fabric, a new analytics platform by Microsoft, extends the principles of Power BI to cover the entire analytics stack, enabling data import, organization, transformation, and storage of structured data for various workloads.
Deep dives
Evolution of Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) has evolved over time, transitioning from being IT-driven to being driven by the business side. This shift has given more power and control to business analysts who use tools like Power BI, designed for easy use by Excel and PowerPoint users. The emphasis in BI has shifted towards providing easy and fast experiences for business decision makers, who demand automated processes and high performance in accessing and analyzing data.
The Power of Power BI
Power BI has emerged as a leading BI tool, known for its user-friendly experience designed for business users. With features reminiscent of PowerPoint and Excel, Power BI allows users to easily create reports, dashboards, and visualizations. Its viral adoption has led to thousands of organizations implementing it, with some having hundreds of thousands of users. Fabric, a new analytics platform, takes the principles that made Power BI successful and extends them to cover the entire analytics stack, enabling data import, organization, transformation, and storage of structured data for various workloads.
The Role of Co-pilots in Data Analytics
Co-pilots, powered by AI, play a significant role in data analytics. They help users generate ideas, recommend approaches, and assist with tasks like creating Python scripts, ETL packages, and reports. Co-pilots in fabric are designed to provide an intelligent and interactive experience, employing knowledge from extensive public data sets. They assist users in working with proprietary data, understand user language, and make intelligent suggestions based on available schema and data instances. Co-pilots aim to augment human expertise and creativity, simplifying workflows and achieving greater productivity.
Fabric: Empowering Data Analytics
Fabric is a SaaS-based analytics platform that revolutionizes data analytics workflows. It streamlines processes by providing auto-integration, auto-optimization, and auto-scaling of resources. With an easy-to-use user interface and pre-built semantic models, fabric removes the need for manual infrastructure management and data movement. It offers a seamless experience for data engineers, data scientists, BI analysts, business users, and developers, ensuring they can work with data efficiently and effectively. With the inclusion of co-pilots and generative AI capabilities, fabric aims to make data analytics accessible to a wider audience.
In this episode, we are joined by Amir Netz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and the CTO of Microsoft Fabric. He discusses how companies can use Microsoft's latest tools for business intelligence.
Amir started by discussing how business intelligence has progressed in relevance over the years. Amir gave a brief introduction into what Power BI and Fabric are. He also discussed how Fabric distinguishes from other BI tools by building an end-to-end tool for the data journey.
Amir spoke about the process of building and deploying machine learning models with Microsoft Fabric. He shared the difference between Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Amir discussed the benefits of Fabric's auto-integration and auto-optimization abilities. He also discussed the capabilities of Copilot in Fabric. He also discussed exciting future developments planned for Fabric. Amir shared techniques for limiting Copilot hallucination.
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