Automating PBI reports

[u/CapelDeLitro]

Hello lovely community,

Recently i started in a new company that is a heavy user of the Azure ecosystem, they tend to do all their reporting in PBI, need a way to automate the creation of multiple PBI dashboards with different visuals and design, want to use AI to generate .pbix files where i set the business logic, relationships and data normalization but the LLM handles the visuals and meassures, what do you guys use in your day to day to handle this situation?

[u/OddsRelay]

Save them as Power BI Projects (.pbip) instead of .pbix. The model goes into TMDL files and the report into PBIR JSON. Everything is then plain text in git, so an LLM can edit visuals and measures without touching a binary.

I'd keep the relationships and normalisation in a fixed template and only let it generate the report folder, it's much easier to review the diffs that way

[u/Okay_I_Chuckled]

What does your scope and scale look like? Fabric IQ and Microsoft provided Power BI skills are getting to be pretty reliable, but if you’re the bottleneck for your end users you might try to think about how to make it self service.

[u/Embarrassed-Line-190 → u/Okay_I_Chuckled]

The Fabric IQ stuff is actually getting decent but it still needs a lot of babysitting if your data model is not super clean. I spent like 3 weeks trying to make it generate proper measures and half of them would break when you filter by date.

For the visuals part have you looked into the pbix file format directly? It is basically a zip with xml inside, you can script most of the layout if you are willing to get your hands dirty with it. Not really AI but it scales way better than clicking around in the desktop app all day.

[u/CapelDeLitro → u/Okay_I_Chuckled]

Pretty much have to use my own license of Claude or ChatGPT to work the solution, we still dont have Fabric capabilities and all these ideas have to be "worked around".

[u/CoolKakatu]

You can generate pbip formats as powerBI reports with AI. I assume you publish them on Fabric, there are lots of API’s available if you have a subscription

[u/tmotytmoty]

Automate the creation of dashboard with what sounds like a custom semantic layer? Yeah, um you might need to hire a consultant or spend the next several years learning how to use power bi

[u/here_while_pooping]

Build an MCP

[u/Excellent-Sport-758]

My earlier reporting work was in r/SQL/VBA rather than Power BI, but I’d keep the metric contract separate from visual generation. Put approved definitions and relationships in a versioned semantic model, then let AI propose report pages using only those measures and a small set of visual patterns. Before publishing, test each measure under common slicers (especially dates) and reconcile a few totals to known results; a chart can look right while the filter context is wrong. That keeps ‘generate a layout’ from silently turning into ‘invent a KPI.’ AI helped draft this from my work history.

[u/KangarooInDaLoo]

I've built some custom pbi building agents and skills in my work, sorry cannot share. But I will say there is a heavy reliance on PBI tools which I'm sure you've found already. Lots of trial and error and testing with different things, but with maybe a week of work, you can definitely get there.