Ten years ago, Power BI entered the market and transformed how businesses interact with data. Before self-service BI, business users waited days, sometimes weeks, for IT teams to build reports and answer data questions. With the introduction of Power BI – any user could download the app for free, connect to their data, and get answers instantly.
This year, as we celebrate 10 years of innovation, we’re grateful to be recognized as a market leader in the AI/BI space with over 35 million monthly active users across 550,000 organizations.
BI’s evolution in the GenAI Era
Since the rise of generative AI, the landscape of business intelligence has fundamentally shifted. Today’s business users expect to interact with their data by asking questions in natural language and receiving instant answers.
Yet, while the promise of AI-powered BI is clear, many organizations struggle to move from experimentation to real adoption. Concerns around data accuracy, governance, and trust hold BI teams back from deploying large language models (LLM) solutions at scale, making it challenging to realize the full potential of next-gen analytics.
At Ignite, we are launching several new capabilities to tackle these challenges. Our latest innovations focus on two key areas:
- For consumers: We’re making Copilot more accessible across devices, and contextually intelligent by understanding user’s business context.
- For creators: we’re opening the platform so technical teams can build custom AI solutions that accelerate analytics workflows without compromising security.
Context aware intelligence at your fingertips
Earlier this year, we announced a new standalone Copilot experience that allowed you to simply chat with your data across reports, semantic models, apps, and data agents that you have access to.
Today we’re excited to announce that we’re extending the standalone Copilot experience to mobile, in preview, allowing you to ask questions about your data and receive visual and textual insights on your mobile device.
The search experience in standalone Copilot is receiving a major update – and will make finding insights faster and more intuitive. Copilot can now automatically select the most relevant data sources, asks clarifying questions when additional context is needed, and provides simpler, text-based search results. With new homepage entry points and suggested prompts, you can start exploring insights more easily than ever. This new experience dramatically reduces time-to-insight by removing manual data source selection and guesswork helping every user get accurate answers faster.
We’re also continuing to invest in our data answering capabilities and improving how users get answers from their data. We’ve made substantial improvements under the hood to how we match user prompts in Copilot to verified answers and the appropriate filters. Verified answers can now interpret and apply filters more accurately, reducing mismatches between what users ask and what’s displayed, better aligning with each user’s prompt. We’re also extending these powerful answering tools to end users through Model Context Protocol (MCP), making it easier than ever to get precise, relevant insights.
Agent‑Ready Semantic Modeling
We’ve heard from you – you want faster answers, less manual querying, and the freedom to build custom AI-driven analytics experiences that fit your organizational needs without compromising on security or control.
Over the next few weeks, we’re rolling out the remote Power BI Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server in Public Preview, that can enable AI agents to securely and remotely chat with your data in Power BI, all while being authenticated with Microsoft Entra ID. With tools to retrieve model schema, generate optimized DAX queries using Copilot, and execute queries instantly. Teams can build custom agents that deliver faster, more accurate insights without manual intervention. Built for interoperability, the MCP Server allows these agents to integrate seamlessly and securely across your analytics landscape.
We’re also making data modeling simpler, smarter and more collaborative with Power BI Modeling MCP Server (Preview). Built on the open MCP standard, it enables AI agents to securely connect with Power BI and interact with semantic models through natural language, so you can focus on intent rather than syntax. You can describe what you want to build, from tables and relationships to measures and refactors, and let AI handle the details. With support for bulk operations, best practice evaluation, and DAX validation, teams can accelerate model development, reduce errors, and bring greater consistency and agility to every stage of the modeling process.
As your organization’s data models grow in complexity, maintaining accuracy, consistency, and governance becomes increasingly challenging. With Semantic Model Version History, now generally available, you can track, compare, and restore previous versions of your semantic models to protect against errors and enable safe experimentation while maintaining full auditability for compliance and governance. With TMDL Visual Studio Code Extension, also generally available, you can author models as code in Visual Studio Code accelerates builds while bringing modern code development practices to semantic modeling.
Ready to transform your business intelligence?
The future of business intelligence is here. AI-powered, accessible, and built for trust. Whether you’re a business user who needs instant answers or a data professional building the next generation of analytics solutions, Power BI gives you the tools to turn your data into impact.
Looking ahead, you can expect a continued focus on simplifying how people interact with data, empowering everyone – from business users to data professionals – to get answers quickly and confidently.
To dive deeper on these announcements, catch our breakout session ‘Empower Business Users with AI driven insights in Microsoft Fabric at Microsoft Ignite on Wednesday November 19th at 4:00 PM PT. To learn more about all the other announcements on Microsoft Fabric, check out Fabric November 2025 Feature Summary | Ignite We look forward to continuing the conversation and sharing what’s next for Power BI at the Fabric Community Conference in Atlanta next March.