580: Making Data AI Ready

Mike & Tommy dive into what it actually means to make data AI-ready, drawing on James Serra's series of articles to explore whether "AI-ready" is a new idea or just good data practice with a new label — and how teams can close the gap between a Copilot demo and a trustworthy answer.They break down the roles of semantic models, metadata, agent instructions, and governance tools like Prep Data for AI and Fabric Data Agent, and walk away with practical guidance on where to start and what to stop doing.Context: https://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2026/09/what-does-it-mean-to-make-data-ai-ready/, https://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2026/09/microsoft-tools-for-making-data-ai-ready/, https://www.jamesserra.com/archive/2026/10/prep-data-for-ai-vs-fabric-data-agent-instructions-what-goes-where/News: https://www.meetup.com/chicagolandpowerbi/events/316158549/?eventOrigin=group_upcoming_events, https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/blog/fbc_fabricupdatesblogs/the-next-chapter-for-cicd-in-fabric-warehouse-preview/5401222, https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/blog/fbc_fabricupdatesblogs/use-onelake-as-native-storage-for-azure-databricks-preview/5377939Get in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy tackle the question that refuses to die: is Power BI actually dead, or just evolving into something most people aren't paying attention to? They dig into whether AI and Fabric are replacing the tool or just reshaping who gets to use it, and what that means for anyone building BI for a living.News links: A Leader in Data Integration — Six Years Running | Announcing the Retirement of R and Python Visuals in Power BIGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy tackle the app revolution hitting Fabric head-on, weighing in on whether agentic development and Microsoft's expanding suite of app-building tools—Fabric apps, SQL apps, and beyond—are solving real business problems or just creating a new wave of ungoverned sprawl. They break down what this shift means for report developers navigating a world where building an app is suddenly easier than building a report, and what guardrails teams need before the wave hits their tenant.News links: OneLake: The File System for Agent-First Data Engineering | Modernize Data Integration with Fabric & Snowflake | Bring Your Fabric Data Into Your Next App with ConnectorsGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy tackle one of BI's most talked-about, least-understood topics: data governance. They dig into whether a Power BI or Fabric rollout can ever truly succeed without it, why leadership buy-in can make or break the effort, and how AI agents might finally give teams the stomach — or the shortcut — to get governance right.News from this episode: Fabric Apps in Org Apps Data Engineering Agent for Fabric – Project Osmos Data Days: Learn, Build, and Connect with AI Microsoft Reactor Event Chicagoland Power BI MeetupGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy dive into the concept of distributed wisdom—how organizations can connect expertise spread across people and teams so that knowledge shapes decisions beyond where it originated—and explore what that means for Microsoft Fabric and agentic tooling. They tackle whether technology like semantic models, the OneLake catalog, and AI agents can actually carry human judgment across an org, or whether the real blockers are process and culture. From governance guardrails to communities of practice, the conversation surfaces practical first steps for BI teams trying to make collective intelligence real inside Fabric.More on the topic: Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate SuicideNews links:DAX LLM Benchmark v2.0 Trailer – SQLBIGovern Your Microsoft Fabric Data Estate from One Place with the OneLake Catalogthisorthat.tipsBook LinkGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy tackle the question of how to match the right LLM to the right Microsoft Fabric workload, exploring whether bigger always means better or just more expensive, and how teams can build a practical model-selection strategy across Power BI, notebooks, pipelines, and more.They break down the planning and execution decisions behind agentic tooling in Fabric—covering Power BI Desktop Bridge, semantic models, and notebooks—and land on a framework for making model choice a deliberate, cost-aware decision rather than a default.News: Fabric Data Warehouse Integration with Fabric User Data Functions (Preview) | Data Visualization in the Agentic EraGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy tackle the emerging role of the semantic model as an AI contract layer in Microsoft Fabric, weighing in on whether Data Agents should reason over governed semantic models or hit OneLake directly. They explore the tension between years of invested business logic in semantic models and the flexibility of Lakehouse-first agent access, breaking down how OneLake Security, RLS, and semantic model permissions can coexist for both traditional BI and AI-powered data workloads.This is a Mailbag episode.Get in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy dive into Fabric Deployment Plans, exploring how this new Fabric item fills a real gap in CI/CD by giving teams explicit control over deployment order, pre- and post-deploy actions, and environment binding — things lineage alone never reliably handled. They weigh whether a visual canvas makes deployments more approachable or just hides what's really happening under the hood, and what teams should nail down before trusting a preview feature with a production release.Learn more: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/cicd/deployment-plan/how-to-create-deployment-plan | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/cicd/deployment-plan/deployment-plan-sample-plansGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy weigh in on the Fabric IQ Ontology Agent, exploring whether a conversational interface built on structured business definitions finally makes ontology worth the investment—or just adds another layer for BI teams to govern. They break down the real cost of building and maintaining an ontology, who owns it when answers go wrong, and whether this changes how business users get to the truth.News: Fabric App Functions – Secure Server-Side Custom Logic (Preview) | File Data Ingestion with Materialized Lake Views in Fabric (Preview)Learn more: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/iq/ontology/tutorial-4-use-agentGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy dive into the Fabric Notebook Toolkit (FNTK), a Python library that makes end-to-end agentic development of Microsoft Fabric Notebooks possible from GitHub Copilot CLI, OpenAI Codex, and Claude Code. They break down whether putting AI agents in the driver's seat of notebook creation raises the bar for governance or just accelerates the chaos. Tune in to find out what guardrails, skills, and mindset shifts BI pros need before letting an agent loose in their workspace.https://pypi.org/project/fabric-notebook-toolkit/News:https://www.meetup.com/chicagolandpowerbi/events/316158533/?eventOrigin=group_upcoming_eventshttps://promptingbi.com/2026/10/08/why-i-built-skill-vault/https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/blog/fbc_fabricupdatesblogs/a-new-look-and-new-capabilities-in-the-capacity-metrics-app-preview/5374114Get in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/