I don’t know how, but somehow I missed the announcement of the preview of Project Sophia at Ignite (it’s not built by the Fabric product group and I’ve been distracted by all the cool stuff we’re working on at the moment, so…). If you’re a fan of Power BI and data in general you are definitely going to want to check it out though! It’s not BI, it’s an “AI-Powered business research canvas” although that description doesn’t really do justice to it; even if you read the announcement blog post you probably won’t get what it does. You need to watch this demo video first, watch this Ignite session if you have more time, read the docs and try it for yourself here if you’re based in North America.
Here’s a quick summary of how it works. You upload some data to work with (you can use it with sample data too), ask it a question, it generates some visual and text-based answers, and then suggests next steps or allows you to click on some data and ask a further question. Each new step in the journey creates a new page of information; you can easily go back and see previous pages.
I fed a subset of the UK Land Registry price paid data into it and while it was far from perfect I was still extremely impressed with the results:
Before you ask the obvious question: at the time of writing it only connects to relatively small Excel, CSV and PDF files. And please don’t ask me any follow up questions about this because I won’t be able to answer them 🙂
Thank you for this information, Chris. It’s always fascinating to learn about new projects like this one. It provides insight into the direction we’re heading in the BI world and how seamlessly businesses will be able to work with data.