How to Create a Visual Report in Power BI with AI
Creating visual reports shouldn't feel like a data science project. With the AI features built directly into Power BI, you can now build insightful charts and dashboards simply by asking questions in plain English. This guide will walk you through exactly how to use these AI tools to turn your raw data into clear, visual reports, step-by-step.
First, What Are Power BI's AI Features?
Microsoft Power BI has been quietly embedding powerful AI assistants into its platform for a while. These aren't just gimmicks, they are designed to speed up your workflow and uncover insights you might have missed. For reporting, three key features will change the way you work:
Q&A Visual: This is the star of the show. It allows you to ask questions about your data using natural language (like "what were our total sales last month by product?"), and Power BI will automatically create a visual to answer it.
Smart Narratives: Once you have a chart, this feature automatically generates a plain-text summary explaining the key takeaways. It’s like having an analyst write the report commentary for you.
AI-Powered Visuals: Tools like Key Influencers and the Decomposition Tree help you go beyond what happened and understand why it happened, performing complex analysis with just a few clicks.
We'll cover how to use each of these to build a comprehensive report from scratch.
Preparing Your Data for AI Analysis
Before you can ask your AI assistant for answers, you need to give it data it can understand. Think of it like organizing your desk before starting a project - a little prep work makes everything that follows much easier. You don't need to be a data engineer, just follow these simple guidelines.
Use Clear and Descriptive Column Headers
This is the most important step. The AI relies on your column names to understand what you're asking. If your sales data has a column named inv_total_q3_final, the AI will struggle. Rename it to something simple and human-readable, like Invoice Total or Sales Revenue.
Good examples:
Customer Name
Order Date
Product Category
Shipping Country
Marketing Spend
If you're wondering how to do this, just open the "Transform data" editor in Power BI, right-click any column header, and choose "Rename."
Check Your Data Types
Make sure Power BI has correctly identified the type of data in each column. Dates should be a "Date" type, numbers should be "Whole Number" or "Decimal," and locations like countries or states should be categorized as such. This helps Power BI properly plot trends over time, calculate sums, and create maps.
You can check and change these data types in the "Transform Data" view, at the top of the interface.
Step-by-Step Guide: Building a Report with the Q&A Visual
The Q&A visual lets you have a conversation with your data. It’s the fastest way to get from a blank canvas to a finished report. Let's walk through an example using typical sales data.
Step 1: Add the Q&A Visual to Your Report
Once you’ve loaded your data into Power BI, you’ll see the main report canvas. In the "Visualizations" pane on the right, find the icon that looks like a speech bubble with a little lightning bolt. This is the Q&A visual. Click it to add it to your report page.
You'll see a box appear that says "Ask a question about your data." Power BI might even give you some suggested questions to get you started.
Step 2: Ask Your First Question
Let's start with a simple, high-level question. Click into the box and type:
“What is our total sales revenue”
As you type, Power BI will suggest terms from your dataset. Almost instantly, it will turn that prompt into a "Card" visual showing you the total sales revenue number. It’s as easy as that. No dragging and dropping fields required.
Step 3: Refine Your Question to Create a Chart
A single number is useful, but a visual report needs charts. Let's break down that sales number by category. You don't need to start a new visual, just refine your existing question:
“What is our total sales revenue by product category”
Power BI will automatically transform the card visual into a bar chart, showing your sales revenue broken down across each product category. Now, let’s specify the chart type directly:
“What is our total sales revenue by product category as a treemap”
Boom. The visual immediately changes to a treemap. You can ask for a bar chart, line chart, pie chart, map, and more, all by just adding the chart type to your question.
Step 4: Filter Your Data Using Natural Language
What if you only want to see data for last year? Or for a specific region? Just add it to your question. Let’s look at a time-based trend:
“Show total sales revenue by month as a line chart for 2023”
Power BI's AI understands time-based phrases like "last year," "this quarter," "in the last 90 days," and specific dates. Adding filters is as simple as stating what you want.
Step 5: Convert Your Q&A Result into a Permanent Visual
Once you are happy with the visual you've generated in the Q&A box, you need to "pin" it to the report page. This converts it from an interactive Q&A result into a standard, persistent chart.
In the top-right corner of the Q&A box, you’ll see an icon that looks like a visual with a pin. Click it.
The Q&A result is now a permanent chart on your report canvas. You can resize it, move it around, and format it just like any other Power BI visual. Repeat this process - ask, refine, pin - to build out your entire report page in just a few minutes.
Adding Context Instantly with Smart Narratives
Now that you have beautiful charts, you need to explain what they mean. Historically, this meant staring at a chart, figuring out the key insights, and manually typing a summary. Not anymore.
The Smart Narrative feature does this for you.
Click on one of the visuals you just created (for example, your sales by product category bar chart).
In the "Visualizations" pane, find and click the "Smart Narrative" icon. It looks like a document with a lightning bolt.
Power BI will instantly analyze the chart and add a dynamic text box to your report with a summary, such as: "Sales Revenue had a range of $1.5M, with the highest value for 'Laptops' and the lowest for 'Accessories.'"
This text is fully editable and dynamically updates as your data or filters change. It’s an incredible time-saver for adding professional, data-backed commentary to your reports without any extra work.
Discovering the "Why" with Advanced AI Visuals
Sometimes you need to go deeper than just describing what happened. Two specific AI visuals are fantastic for this kind of root cause analysis.
The Key Influencers Visual
This visual helps you understand what factors drive a particular outcome. For example, what influences a customer to make a second purchase? Or what makes a manufacturing process fail?
To use it, add the "Key Influencers" visual from the Visualizations pane. Then:
Drag the metric you want to Analyze (e.g., "Customer Rating").
Drag the factors you want to investigate into the Explain by field (e.g., "Discount Applied," "Product Category," "Delivery Time").
The visual will automatically perform a statistical analysis and show you exactly which factors have the biggest impact on your target metric. It might show you that when "Delivery Time" is less than 2 days, the likelihood of a high rating increases by 2.5x. This moves you from simple reporting to true, actionable insight.
The Decomposition Tree Visual
The Decomposition Tree is perfect for drilling down into your data across many dimensions simultaneously. Imagine you want to find out where your website traffic is coming from.
Add the "Decomposition Tree" visual to your report. Drag "Website Sessions" into the Analyze field and then drag a few dimensions you want to explore into the Explain by field, like: Channel, Campaign Name, Device, and Country.
The visual will start with your total sessions. You can then click the "+" icon to break it down, clicking first by Channel (e.g., Organic Search vs. Paid Social) and then drilling further into Organic Search to see the breakdown by Country, finding hidden pockets of opportunity.
Final Thoughts
Creating visual reports in Power BI with AI turns data analysis from a technical chore into an intuitive conversation. By leveraging tools like the Q&A visual and Smart Narratives, you can ask questions in natural language and receive instant answers, allowing you to spend more time on strategy and less time wrestling with report settings.
We built Graphed to push this conversational approach even further. While Power BI streamlines work on a single dataset, we designed Graphed to connect all your disparate marketing and sales data - from Shopify and Salesforce to Google Analytics and Facebook Ads - into one place. You can then use plain English to build entire, real-time dashboards and reports from scratch by simply describing what you want to see. This frees your teams from manual reporting while giving everyone access to the insights they need to make better decisions.