PowerBI unleashed in Slack

[fulljoin]

Hey everyone,

Lately, I’ve been falling in love with the Power BI Semantic Model. The more I work with it, the more it feels like the real deliverable of a data team - dashboards, Excel connections, or AI agents are just interfaces built on top of it.

I’m currently building a small product experiment that lets users query the Power BI Semantic Model directly from Slack using natural language - and I’d love some feedback from this community.

The vision (so far):

• Access control and semantic model is defined once within Power BI.
• Slack threads maintain context, so users can ask follow-up questions or drill down on the same dataset.
• Data teams get observability into what business users are asking for (e.g., missing metrics or popular dimensions).

It feels really elegant (on paper, at least), and I’m starting to test early prototypes.

How does this sound to you?
Would you see value in this kind of setup either as a data engineer or a Power BI stakeholder?

Happy to share more or onboard early beta users if someone’s curious to play with it.

Algirdas

[fulljoin]

Thanks v-sgandrathi!

This seems super valuable.

The only part I think you've missed is that I am NOT building this for my own organisation.
I want to build a tool and sell it as a SaaS, in such case your solution does not scale. I could implement this for my customers one by one if they want it to run 'locally' in their own Azure environment.

[v-sgandrathi]

Hi @fulljoin,

That’s a great idea, using Slack to query the Power BI Semantic Model could make insights more accessible and interactive. You’re correct that Fabric Data Agent is best suited for single-tenant environments. For a scalable SaaS solution, consider Power BI Embedded architecture with service principal profiles, the ExecuteQueries REST API, or XMLA endpoints to securely query each customer’s semantic model.

You can also integrate Fabric Data Agent with Slack Bolt (Python) to preserve conversational context and provide natural language responses.

Thank you.

[v-sgandrathi]

Hi @fulljoin,

Just wanted to follow up and confirm that everything has been going well on this. Please let me know if there’s anything from our end.
Please feel free to reach out Microsoft fabric community forum.

[v-sgandrathi]

Hi @fulljoin,

With a data agent in Microsoft Fabric, you can create conversational AI experiences that answer questions about data stored in lakehouses, warehouses, Power BI semantic models, and KQL databases in Fabric. Your colleagues can ask questions in plain English and receive data-driven answers, even if they aren't AI experts or deeply familiar with the data.
Create a Fabric data agent (preview) - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Add Power BI semantic model as data source to Fabric data agent - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Please use this feature to create an agent to query your semantic model

Combine that with the Python SDK to create a channel in Slack
Consume Fabric data agent from external applications with Python client SDK - Microsoft Fabric | Mic...
This article shows how to use the Python client SDK to add a Fabric data agent to web apps and other clients by using interactive browser authentication.

Thank you.