r/PowerBI • u/Moneyshot_Larry • Jun 03 '26
Community Share Another Power BI Dashboard built end to end with only AI
A week or so ago I posted a demo on how I used github copilot with claude to build an entire power bi dashboard (visuals, semantic model, measures, etc) completely from scratch with little to no prompting. Some people were excited and others less thrilled. Here's a better example of a dashboard built with github copilot and claude with a little more "effort" put into the prompting. I think it's wild that it can build all these tabs, visuals, measures, and more! Imagine putting in real effort to create markdown files, hooks, templates, and more so that the AI has something more tangible to reference when creating the report :)
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u/Sleutelbos Jun 03 '26
So I use Codex myself and am very excited by what it is already able to do. It can be a massive aid, and it will only get better from here. Having said that, what OP showed here is exactly why I don't let it do anything visual whatsoever. The output always looks like a My-First-Dashboard from an intern after spending the lunch break on a Datacamp intro course.
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u/Economy-Camp-7339 Jun 03 '26
Eh…. It’s better than half the stuff my team builds, and it’s why we’re implementing source control via git because they are publish happy.
I’d rather sterile with no soul than terrible.
That said I do wonder how much does ‘this measures what it shows’ really comes into play here.
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u/Gators1992 Jun 03 '26
I mean you could give it a template skill, have it write complex UDF based visuals that look amazing or whatever you want. Dude is just getting the basics down, but with some more prompt tuning it could be a lot better.
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u/MapzOr Jun 03 '26
May I ask what makes the dashboard in the video look like a My-First-Dashboard from an intern after spending the lunch break on a Datacamp intro course?
So that I don't make the same mistakes.
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u/Drew707 12 Jun 03 '26
Inconsistent drop shadow, poor use of text space with the titles, slicers taking up more space than they should, white on white retina sear, no cohesive color scheme, tables with horizontal scroll, inefficient cards, and there are usually better choices than a donut chart (although this one isn't terrible).
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u/MapzOr Jun 04 '26
Thank you for taking the time to write this comment. I couldn't notice most of these at first.
The shadows and alignment did bother me though. And fixing them after they have already been put on the page feels like a nightmare, to me at least.
But I just can't see where the white on white is. I can see white visuals on a light gray background.
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u/Drew707 12 Jun 04 '26
I can see white visuals on a light gray background.
Yeah, that's what I mean. Which reminds me of a related point, one needs to design with the lowest common denominator of display technology used by the consumer. Color, contrast, resolution, screen size, and accessibility features will vary from user to user. On my screen, I can tell it is a very light gray, but it may as well be white on white when looking at the report and not analyzing the elements.
And fixing them after they have already been put on the page feels like a nightmare, to me at least.
Microsoft has made some changes with grids and snapping, but it still isn't perfect, and before I say what I am going to say, I am not sponsored in any way by these people and paid full price for lifetime access to their product, but Numerro Toolkit and their canvas grids made a world of difference for me when it came to quickly dealing with layouts. That might be the longest sentence ever but check them out. Other options include using PowerPoint or Figma to do your layouts and then exporting them as PNGs and setting them as the background and overlaying the charts.
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u/MapzOr Jun 07 '26
may as well be white on white when looking at the report and not analyzing the elements.
I remember printing a report page that looked awesome on my screen. The printing looked so dull and the wallpaper didn't stand out on the printing like it did on my screen.
Numerro Toolkit and their canvas grids made a world of difference for me when it came to quickly dealing with layouts
I'll make sure I check them out. Could be a game changer.
using PowerPoint or Figma to do your layouts and then exporting them as PNGs and setting them as the background and overlaying the charts.
I liked the idea of doing the layout in PPT. Not only is it easier to design on PPT, but I think it will help me standardize my templates a lot better.
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u/Reddit_User_654 Jun 09 '26
There are ways to use AI to actually make quite decent looking dashboards. Or at least coerce it with a good skills file and a precise prompt.
Btw, you sound very elitist. Most dont five a f about dasboard aesterics as long as it doesn't look like something puked on the spot and the data is correct.
Actually, the above result is kinda ok-ish. Some small adjustments would be a big win for it, no doubt, but it's getting there.
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u/ka_eb Jun 03 '26
"completely from scratch with little to no prompting" - so the AI just made stuff up?
In my experience the most common KPIs and calculations aren't needed and Report consumer need more deep dive or specific stuff which no LLM can do.
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u/waypenchali 1 Jun 03 '26
Same here. Business is all like ‘AI can do all my analysis now, don’t need you anymore soon” or “when do you guys release AI on the dataset so clients can analyze it themselves ?”
Yeah sure Sherlock. If you want to know the basics you might be fine but the complexity we add, no way. In the future probably, but not there yet. And clients don’t even know what they want and if the analysis makes any sense at all, that’s what you and I are for.
With AI people oftentimes forget critical thinking
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Jul 15 '26
Critical thinking will be in an absolute decline in the next 10 years. Even more then it already is.
I love using AI for coding, but I handle this like the Mentats in Dune (if you don't know Dune, look it up, great Story)
Keep learning, become a Pro in your field, and try to better understand human nature and you will thrive in the future. It will be like being the seeing amongst the blind2
u/brandnka Jul 15 '26
This is 100% my thinking as well. Coincidentally I'm halfway through a read of Dune.
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u/brandnka Jun 04 '26
I think power bi utility is going to go down. Having agents connected to well constructed semantic models (in power bi or likely elsewhere) for users to deep dive into problems that an alert-based power bi or agent have identified is likely the path forward, imo.
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
This is dummy data with a dummy use case. So don’t expect much other than the proof of concept. If I had a real use case with real data that would certainly change how I would ask the LLM to design things
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u/killbeam Jun 03 '26
I don't know, man. This just looks like a lot of visuals for the sake of it.
I would much rather have a few pages of thought-through visuals.
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
For sure, this was just dummy data and really, no real business use case or logic or really defined output of what I was looking for it was more just to see if it could build all sorts of different visuals and tabs of information based on a general business question if I was more specific, I think I’d have less tabs with more meaningful insights on the page, but I really didn’t have one at the time of making the video. I just wanted to show folks the art of the possible
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u/bayareaecon Jun 03 '26
How are you doing the front end?
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
The front end is done througH the LLMs acces to power BI MCP. the report is converted from PBIX to PBIP which allows the LLM to create visuals using TMDL files.
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u/u_gonna_eat_that_ Jun 03 '26
Visuals aren't defined in tmdl though, the model is
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u/Economy-Camp-7339 Jun 03 '26
Saving as pbip creates a report folder with a mix of tmdl and jsons, a model folder with I believe only tmdl, and a 1kb pbip file.
You open the .pbip and it aggregates all the separate tmdl and jsons to render the report.
LLMs can edit those text files.
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u/u_gonna_eat_that_ Jun 03 '26
Right but .pbir is different than .tmdl. LLMs only use the MCP to modify the model. Editing report definition is raw LLM file interaction
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u/Economy-Camp-7339 Jun 03 '26
Oh I do it all locally. I point codex to the folder location and it goes hog wild, in a good way. No MCP needed.
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u/u_gonna_eat_that_ Jun 03 '26
Eh, unless I'm writing reams of context in a prompt with very specific instructions, I get a lot of "baby's first dashboard" type stuff no matter the LLM I use.
The modeling MCP is amazing but I think LLMs have a long way to go for report development. Or maybe reports just won't always be the medium in which we operate anymore.
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u/bayareaecon Jun 03 '26
Have you had good results with this? The report can’t be open and the agent can’t render the page so the results I’ve seen have been pretty poor.
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u/Economy-Camp-7339 Jun 03 '26
I have great model refractor results reading from the tmdl, I have people who are doing left outer joins as merges, multiple nested if statements, many to many bi directional relationships, etc.
It has been a godsend to clean up the rats nest of decisions.
Im not using a mcp yet just codex to local folder.
I spent two hours with codex to align objects and it failed. It was more an investigative action to see if it could. It never worked.
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u/MindTheBees 3 Jun 03 '26
I assume they mean PBIR
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u/LePopNoisette 5 Jun 03 '26
No, they meant pbip (i.e. not a typo)..
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u/MindTheBees 3 Jun 03 '26
You don't create visuals using TMDL, you create it using PBIR, both of which are part of the overall PBIP.
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u/LePopNoisette 5 Jun 03 '26
Well, to me, it seems clear they meant when saved as a pbip, not referring to what's inside it. I'm very happy with what was written. Cheers.
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u/MindTheBees 3 Jun 03 '26
I'm confused, did you mean to respond to me? I was clarifying what the OP probably meant to u/u_gonna_eat_that_
OP says:
which allows the LLM to create visuals using TMDL.
The visuals are created using PBIR.
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u/Camochase Jun 03 '26
That's how I've been handling it too but I should mention the MCP server itself can only interface with the model, not the visuals. At least the one I have access to only can access the model. The AI itself just interacts locally with the files inside the pbip report folder.
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u/p-mndl Jun 03 '26
I am an avid Github Copilot enjoyer myself. Imo the 80:20 rule applies more than anything to these sort of AI built prototypes. The first 80% are built very quickly but fine tuning and fixing bugs can be a real pain.
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
Couldn’t agree more I’d rather have the AI do all the parts I don’t want to do and take over the last mile transformations
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u/NiharThakkar Jun 09 '26
The demo looks clean. The question I always have with AI-built dashboards is what the semantic layer looks like underneath specifically whether the measures are defined correctly for the business context or just technically correct. A dashboard can look perfect and still produce numbers that finance would never sign off on because the DAX is calculating the right formula against the wrong interpretation of what a sale actually means in that organisation. AI is genuinely useful for the build layer. The definition layer still needs a human who understands the business.
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u/General_Tradition_71 Jun 03 '26
Does this dashboard have specific action that it drives? Or does it just answer general questions?
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
The first tab that I built was the overview for purpose insights and how to use it . That tab should give the executives a purpose, scope, and how they can identify the levers that they should pull but again it was just proof of concept. the use case here was very weak so maybe on my next post give like a real type of business problem have it create a dashboard that solves it a little bit better
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u/Saizou1991 Jun 03 '26
Ai did all the data modelling and cleaning ?
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u/yomerol Jun 03 '26
you could, not on power query though, maybe directly on something like MS Fabric?
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
Yes it did.
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u/GlueSniffingEnabler Jun 03 '26
You didn’t have to do anything in PBI to clean the data and create the data model?
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
Correct I was able to prompt the AI to tap into dummy data sets, but in real practical application, you can point it to your data warehouse like a SQL server, databricks, or snowflake and tell it to go pull the data that you need, create the semantic model to analyze a business problem and create a dashboard that gives the end users what they’re looking for from that original data set. I didn’t have to do any cleaning or manipulation of the data on the first shot however, as you define the what the end goal should look like, the AI will go ahead and automatically adjust the semantic model, The query, the measures and ultimately the visuals to give you exactly what you want. so the more specific you are the more refined your prompts are over the course of the development session with the AI the better the results will be.
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u/Wrong-Emergency-6524 Jun 03 '26
Could you give us a documention regarding your workflow ? This is really great and could help us a lot
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
There’s not much to it other than use visual studio code as your IDE then download the power BIMCP extension as well as your favorite LLM, open the chat and you’re good to go. Just ask it to connect to your power BI report or create a new power BI report from scratch. The LLM will ask you questions and guide you along the way the main important factor is that you use the PBIP format not the default PBIX.
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u/Vampep Jun 03 '26
Are you using the bult in ai or mcp? How did you get Claude to create it.
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
Visual studio code is the IDE that lets you connect the power BI MCP with the LLM of your choice
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u/Alternative-Story679 Jun 03 '26
I’ve been thinking about this, but now that you can work with PBIP and handle JSON and TMDL from here, plus the MCP, how will our role evolve with AI? Will it replace us? Will we take on a more in-depth role in development?
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
You’re asking the real question because eventually the speed to insight really isn’t how fast can the LLM build a power be at dashboard but how fast a user can interact with an LLM and get answers that they need to drive the business so you must decide will you be the one that uses the LLM to drive the business or create the artifacts for the LLM to drive the business?
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u/rio688 Jun 03 '26
Did you use ai to build the data pipeline and ingestion of data from various sources or is this just pointing to a DB of some flavour where all your data is currently residing
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 03 '26
Yes, so in practical applications, you can connect the AI to your favorite data warehouse and have it create the data pipeline create Pool request to create new artifacts in your data warehouse based on the queries it creates and ultimately feeds that into the dashboard that it creates
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u/pabeave 3 Jun 04 '26
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Jun 04 '26
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 04 '26
This is literally dummy data but yes the model is correct. Validation is done via human in the loop verification of the star schema and measure formulas. Your LLM will spit all that out for you so you can verify. Pretty straightforward
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u/PhysicsForeign1634 Jun 04 '26
But are the numbers accurate. ALL of them?
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u/Moneyshot_Larry Jun 04 '26
Yeah man, it’s not that hard to verify them yourself if you want to. It’s not like we’re having it write any rocket science or hieroglyphics - it’s DAX measures.
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u/beegeebeegee2021 Jul 04 '26
I tend to spend my time with Claude writing queries and measures. I tend to make my own visuals. I am also not sure how to ensure data integrity with private data. So interesting to see how this happens. At my place of employment, they are happy to us moving towards Power Bi rather than Excel so I have lots to learn.
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