My take on future of PowerBI
As someone who has been working extensively on agentic Power BI development over the past 8 months, pushed multiple dashboards to production for several organisations without touching GUI, could not remember when I last dragged and dropped a visual. Created multiple games in powerBI using custom visuals with coding, here is my take.
1. Power BI / React Dashboards / Claude Dashboards
At the end of the day, these are all tools to showcase insights. There are many aspects in business, like requirement gathering, Module knowledge, KPIs, data modelling, Warehousing, and various other things that matter more.
As I have said before, Power BI is just 20% of BI. The remaining 80% consists of all other stuff, both technical and non-technical
2. The days of manually building the frontend in Power BI are gone.
If you are still dragging and dropping visuals in Power BI, don't expect to get a Power BI developer job in the coming years. GUI is gone. Upskill yourself to CLI, or suffer a worse fate. Maybe your experience can get you a job, but forget job security
Delivery expectations have gone sky-high. You cannot make a dashboard in a week when another dev can make it in 3 hours. You will be replaced
Design systems, including Themes, will be completely based on Code. If you are still writing DAX and Power Query end-to-end manually, GGWP
3. If you are a fresher/junior developer, I would still suggest exploring the GUI for at least a couple of months before using AI.
Even for DAX and Power Query, initially, write the code yourself. Don't use AI from day one, or you will miss learning the basics. The foundation of the building is very important.
If you vibe-code or create measures/columns without understanding them, you will fail eventually.
There are still concepts that need to be studied properly, like relationships, RLS, drill-down, schema, etc. You cannot become an industry expert BI Dev using Blind AI Coding. You need to understand concepts thoroughly
4. Trust takes years to build and seconds to break.
This is the best example for BI. If a stakeholder sees your dashboard and finds errors, they may never trust you again.
With AI vibe coding, there is always a chance of errors. Even with all the checks, skills, and agents, I have personally created countless skills and agents for data and logic verification, yet they have failed me many times.
For critical reports, vibe-coding formulas without proper validation is dangerous and may even take your job. I personally know a friend who lost a job because of this, failed a critical report
5. Remember my quote: "AI will close some doors of opportunity, but it will open many."
There are still many companies using Excel for dashboarding and sharing data. Power BI hasn't replaced BI in those organisations. How will AI replace them?
After this AI wave for Dashboards, they will get exposure to using Power BI, thus creating an opportunity for us. I personally know a billion-dollar company still using Excel for data analysis
6. Data quality is the most important thing for a presentable Power BI dashboard.
Otherwise, it is just slop that no manager can use to gain insights.
Even if you connect a database to AI and ask questions, how can AI give you the right answers without proper business logic and parameters?
Especially in ERPs like SAP, where multiple custom logics are implemented, AI has no way of knowing all of them automatically. Every business has its own logic. Without proper documentation, AI-driven analytics is not possible.
7. Power BI is secondary. Data comes first.
As long as your organisation's data is not up to gold standards and properly warehoused, AI dashboard slop will not be helpful
8. And the most important point: the days of being just a Power BI developer are gone.
Get data → Create dashboard. This approach is a thing of the past.
Now, even as a Power BI developer, you should know data engineering, along with a little bit of CI/CD and coding.
Previously, even non-technical people could jump into Power BI because it was easy. Just drag and drop visuals, and you're done.
Not anymore.
Even Microsoft Fabric has also become an integral part of the Power BI ecosystem. You need to know Azure, coding, GitHub, and many other tools. Including DAX, JSON, TMDL, M query, SQL, Python, and many more
TL;DR
The frontend part will be completely replaced by AI, but the backend part will not.
Backend = Logic + Data Warehousing + Technical stuff + Business Requirement Translation