How machine learning speeds up Power BI reports

The goal of Power BI (and any business intelligence tool) is to replace the hunches and opinions businesses use to make decisions with facts based on data. That means the insights in that data have to be available quickly, so you can pull up a report while people are still discussing what it covers, not five minutes later when everyone has already made up their mind. To make that happen even with large data sets, wherever they're stored, Microsoft now uses machine learning to tune how the data gets accessed. When you have enough data to make decisions with, you need to consolidate and summarize it, while still keeping the original dimensions--so you can look at total sales combined across all departments and get an overview but then slice it by region or month to compare trends. Most Power BI users need these aggregated queries, CTO of Microsoft Analytics Amir Netz told TechRepublic.