Chapter 1: Introducing AI in Power BI

Everyone wants to be working with data. Organizations are keen on relying more on data-driven decisions instead of intuition-driven decisions. To be driven by data, we need to extract insights from data. Thankfully, Power BI is a great tool to visualize and share what the data tells us. To better understand what trends and learning we can derive from data, we can use techniques from the field of data science.

Data science and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly popular approaches to extracting insights from data. Among other things, this is because these tools allow us to work with unstructured data, which we couldn't work with before. And this helps us to more quickly find complicated trends and patterns in the data.

In this book, we will focus on using Microsoft Power BI as a data exploration and visualization tool. And we will take some parts of the Azure cloud to give us the power to train models and integrate this with Power BI.

But first, let's start with some of the groundwork. We need to understand what AI is, to properly scope our projects and run them successfully. We need to know what is possible and how we go from a simple dataset to an AI model before we get into the details of each step of the process. That is why we will first dive into the following questions:

• What do we expect from a data analyst?
• What is AI?
• Why should we use AI in Power BI?
• What are our options for AI in Power BI?

Let's start with covering the basics.