r/PowerBIdashboards

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

reddit.com

u/Jaapuchkeaa — 5 days ago

▲ 242 r/PowerBIdashboards+1 crossposts

CS 1.6 Replica in PowerBI

Again, same logic as I used in Flappy Bird, Custom Visuals + PBIP+ Claude code, This is just V1.0, so many things to improve,

Issue I am facing

1- Cannot look and fire both using the mouse we can use either of them. The mouse is only used for looking and aiming, shooting and scoping use other keyboard hotkeys

AI Summarization of what i did -

I built a playable CS-style FPS inside Power BI as a custom visual (three.js + PBIP). Here's what the visual sandbox does and doesn't allow

I wanted to embed a browser Counter-Strike trainer in a report. That's a dead end: the site sends X-Frame-Options: DENY / frame-ancestors 'none', so no HTML or web-content visual can show it. So I rebuilt it as a custom visual.

Stack

.pbiviz in TypeScript + three.js (WebGL), about 650 KB, embedded in the PBIP under CustomVisuals/ with a resourcePackages entry, so the report opens with nothing to import
Everything is procedural (canvas textures, WebAudio gunshots), so the visual needs no network access (privileges: [])
Aim range, a spray lab that scores recoil control in cm, and a bot duel where bots peek and shoot back. WASD movement with CS-style moving inaccuracy

The data part

Weapons are rows in the model. Damage, RPM, magazine and armour pen are bound measures that drive the gameplay (e.g. whether an AK headshot one-taps a helmet)
A slicer on weapon class changes your loadout. Equipping a weapon cross-filters the native cards and charts through selectionManager
Best scores persist into visual.json via persistProperties

What the sandbox won't let you do
Third-party visuals get sandbox="allow-scripts" and nothing else. I checked Desktop's own JS: pointer lock isn't even among the permissions it can grant. So real mouse-look is impossible. Workaround: drag to look (pointer capture keeps turning past the visual's edge), F to fire, and a tap to fire as a fallback.

Gotchas

The pbiviz linter rejects Math.random and innerHTML, so I used a seeded PRNG and DOM APIs
Desktop caches bundles by GUID + version. Bump the version and reopen; a reload isn't enough
A custom theme's name must include .json and match its resource item, or validation fails

I tested everything in headless Chrome, with a stub host inside an allow-scripts-only iframe, before opening Desktop.

Again, if you want tutorial, let me know. not getting time and motivation to edit video, if this became #1 post today, i will make it

u/Jaapuchkeaa — 14 days ago

▲ 2 r/PowerBIdashboards+1 crossposts

Hierarchies where some nodes have two parents: how I handled it in a network graph visual

Disclosure first: I build Power BI custom visuals, and this is about one I made (Zentrix Network Graph). No link in the post. Happy to share it in the comments if anyone wants it.

A question I kept running into while researching relationship data in Power BI: what do you do when a hierarchy isn't really a tree? A company owned by two parent companies, shareholdings split across owners, someone with a dotted-line manager. Hierarchy visuals assume one parent per node, so the second link has nowhere to go.

The underlying problem is that this data is a graph that's mostly a tree. If you're stuck with a one-parent visual, one workaround is to pick a primary parent per row in Power Query and put the second relationship in a tooltip. That works, but the second link is invisible unless you hover.

What I did in the network graph:

- Force layout draws every relationship from just a source and a target column, so you see the network as it actually is.

- Tree layout picks one structural parent per node, so it still reads top-down. Every extra parent is still drawn, as a lighter curved dashed line.

- If you have a parent column you can bind it. If not, it works the hierarchy out from the links: the most connected node becomes the root, then breadth-first from there. Same data gives the same layout every refresh.

- Hovering a node lights up all of its links and lists them in the hover card.

Where it's not a great fit: if most nodes have several parents, it isn't really a hierarchy any more, and the force layout will read better than forcing a tree.

Curious how others model this. Do you keep a "primary parent" column, or a separate bridge table for the extra relationships?

u/AnujShaan — 10 days ago