Building to Teach: AI-Assisted Tools for Data Viz Education (w/ Ben Ferry)

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

September 4th, 2026 - 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

What if you could use your own expertise and AI to build a tool that didn't exist yet? Ben did exactly that.

He built Ferry Tales Studio, a browser-based Vega-Lite chart editor for Power BI and Deneb users, using Claude Code to design, iterate, and ship something genuinely useful. In this live demo, Ben walks through the tool and explains why he built it: to give people a hands-on way to learn data visualisation by doing.

The takeaway: you don't need to be a software engineer to build tools that teach.

GUEST BIO (Ben Ferry) 👤

Ben Ferry is a Senior Analytics Consultant at Solita Germany with a passion for data visualisation and making it more accessible. Through Power BI Ferry Tales, he creates content and tools to help the data community grow. Ferry Tales Studio, built with Claude Code, is his latest example of how practitioners can use AI to ship real, useful products without a traditional engineering background.

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Your Core Model Isn't Supposed to Do Everything | Power BI Extensibility Layer Objects

Video by: Reid Havens

Here's something that trips up a lot of Power BI developers: not everything belongs in your core semantic model. Some objects are meant to live in a departmental layer. Some belong in a single report, knowing the difference changes how you build, and how well your architecture holds up over time.

In this video I walk through Power BI's extensibility layer objects: what they are, where each one belongs in your architecture, and when to actually use them.

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AI-Powered Power BI: Building Custom Themes & Visuals with GitHub Copilot - with Zoe Douglas

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

February 20th, 2026 - 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

GitHub Copilot can turn Power BI customization from a tedious, manual grind into a fast, interactive workflow. In this session, you’ll see how to generate polished report themes by extracting color palettes from images, create named style presets that show up directly in Power BI’s formatting pane, and build custom visuals from scratch with Copilot as your pair programmer. From JSON theme schemas to visual implementation details, you’ll leave with practical techniques to speed up development, improve consistency, and ship better-looking reports with less trial-and-error.

GUEST BIO (Zoe Douglas)👤

I'm a product manager for Power BI working on core visuals with focus on the default and theming experience with visuals in reports. I'm also good with a semantic model and worked on features such as DAX query view, Copilot to write DAX queries, Copilot to write measure descriptions, Optimize ribbon, and more! Before coming to Power BI product group I was a Power BI consultant using Power BI everyday to bring insights to action!

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Empowering Users: Driving Adoption Using Low-Code with Fabric - with Laura Graham-Brown

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

January 23rd, 2026 - 9:30AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

Microsoft Fabric and the Power Platform give business users low-code entry points to build solutions that solve real problems fast. These solutions may not always align with long-term architectural ideals or developer preferences, but they drive adoption, unblock teams, and often succeed where more “perfect” solutions stall.

In this session, we’ll explore how Fabric and Power Platform can work together to empower users while still keeping IT sane. Examples include lightweight databases backing Power Apps for small teams, or semantic models feeding automations that deliver insights directly to sales teams.

The focus is not on replacing professional development practices, but on enabling business developers to build responsibly, in ways that IT can support rather than clean up later. Expect practical examples, a realistic view of trade-offs, and a few short demos showing how low-code solutions can deliver value quickly without becoming tomorrow’s problem.

GUEST BIO 👤

Laura GB has spent over 30 years training and consulting with business developers, helping them design and own the solutions they build. Her work sits at the intersection of low-code development, governance, and practical enablement, with a strong focus on empowering users to build safely in ways IT can support.

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