FabCon 2025, Day 2: At ten years old, Power BI progresses within Fabric and Copilot momentum

Power BI has its roots in the union of separate Microsoft data tools that came together ten years ago. Looking back at its history at this week’s Microsoft Fabric Community Conference the product team remarked on some of the key evolutionary steps over the years. They reminded the audience of the introduction of custom visualizations in 2015, the bookmark feature around 2017, new AI visuals in 2018 and 2019, integration with HoloLens and Teams in 2020, and native PowerPoint integration in the years since.

From late 2023 onward, bringing Power BI into the Fabric stack has been one of the major shifts, but Microsoft global product manager Mohammad Ali noted that the team continues to add to the experience with a new “proper” dark mode and new visuals like slicers, cards, and mapping.

While there has been steady evolution and some important changes like realignment with Fabric, Ali told the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 audience that Power BI should still be viewed as a bridge between the business user and the data and IT professionals.

Our goal in Power BI has not changed. Our strategy has not changed. We see Power BI as the glue, the bridge, the thing that connects two separate worlds together. And [one side] we see Microsoft Fabric, the data platform people, the pro BI users who want to bring in data at scale in a lakehouse, warehouse, or database and then harness the power of that data. And then on the other side, you've got all your business users in PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and they are the ones who consume the data, get insight from the data, and we really see Power BI, the tissue that connects both walls together. And this has been the strategy for us in the last couple of years. And I don't see us changing this strategy in the next couple years either.

Moving Power BI into the Fabric ecosystem has also raised questions from some in the community. In an interview with MSDW, Microsoft CVP Arun Ulag stated that the company remains committed to Power BI continues, as evidenced by this week’s event and the developments and advances reported on an ongoing basis. He said:

Power BI is incredibly important to customers and it's incredibly important to Microsoft. We have a massive investment in Power BI. It's only gone up over the last [few] years since Fabric has launched. 

So I'll share a couple of things. The first is that if you look at just the Power BI blog, which shows all the features that we ship in Power BI, you just see it hasn't slowed down. Just looking at the features that we shipped month after month after month.

Second, you'll also see us adding a lot of the professional development capabilities that customers were looking for. Power BI is doing a lot of enterprise workloads, things like opening up the semantic model in text form, being able to do CI/CD on Power BI reports and semantic models. 

One of the biggest innovations in Fabric that customers really love is the Direct Lake mode where Power BI can natively work with the data in OneLake like Apache Parquet Delta Lake without importing the data in and give you close to import mode performance which is just crazy fast compared to pretty much every other platform out there. So we are definitely heavily invested in Power BI and the growth of Power BI has only accelerated since Fabric has launched.

Highlights for the near future

At FabCon this weke, the Power BI product team showed off a range of upcoming improvements and new features to the FabCon audience.