BI Pixie Workload on Fabric: From Power BI Usage to AI Readiness - w/ Gil Raviv

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

August 7th 2026 - 9:30 (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

Power BI tells you how many times a report was opened, but not whether people actually understood it, trusted it, or found what they needed. BI Pixie is a usage analytics and AI readiness solution for Power BI, now available as a native Microsoft Fabric workload.

In this session, we'll demo the latest BI Pixie features and take you on a journey from Power BI usage to AI readiness. We'll start by showing how BI Pixie captures what really happens inside your reports, with visual-level heatmaps, click and filter tracking, and in-report satisfaction signals that reveal which content drives value and which quietly gets ignored.

Then we'll move up the stack to the part everyone is asking about: getting your data ready for AI. You'll see how BI Pixie assesses whether your semantic models are ready for AI agents like Copilot, Fabric data agents, and MCP with an engagement-weighted Readiness Score; how it optimizes those models with targeted improvements; and how you can create benchmarks to verify the effectiveness of your data agents and semantic models over time.

If you own Power BI adoption and you're wondering how to prepare your estate for AI, this one is for you.

GUEST BIO (Gil Raviv) 👤

Gil Raviv is the founder of BI Pixie and DataChant Consulting, and a Microsoft MVP. Gil has led global BI practices at Avanade/Accenture and AWS and today focuses on helping enterprises measure and improve the adoption, trust, and governance of their Power BI reports through BI Pixie.

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Materialized Lake Views in Microsoft Fabric: How They Actually Work

Video by: Reid Havens

Every report hitting your raw tables runs the same expensive joins and aggregations over and over, even when the underlying data hasn't moved. Materialized Lake Views in Microsoft Fabric pre-compute those results once and store them as Delta tables in OneLake, so consumers read finished numbers instead of recalculating from scratch.

In this video I cover what MLVs actually are, how the automatic refresh logic decides between skip, incremental, and full rebuild, the Spark SQL syntax to create and manage them, and where they sit in a medallion architecture (think of them as a "Gold+" layer).

The part worth sticking around for: point Direct Lake at an MLV instead of your raw tables and you get pre-aggregated data at import speed. In the example here, a 50 million row fact table collapses to around 500K. Fewer rows means faster transcoding into VertiPaq and a lot less DirectQuery fallback risk. That's the single best reason to pair the two.

I also get into when NOT to use them, because they're not free. Sub-minute volatile data, tiny tables, and row-level security needs are all cases where an MLV is the wrong tool.

Writeback with Fabric Planning: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get Started (with Gopal)

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

April 17th, 2026 (9:30 AM - Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

Writeback is one of the most requested capabilities in the Power BI community. It is now native in Microsoft Fabric with the newly announced Fabric Plan Item in Fabric IQ

In this session, Gopal Krishnamurthy and Reid Havens break down exactly how writeback works natively in Fabric Planning, including:

• how business users can create report and enterprise planning apps on top of semantic models

• how other stakeholders can collaborate and enter plan, forecast data

• how those inputs are written back to Fabric SQL

• how organizations can govern the data management process with PowerTable’s Live writeback and

• how you can do variance commentaries and commentary writeback with intelligence sheets

Whether you're an FP&A or Ops team tired of budget spreadsheets or a BI developer who's been asked to build an enterprise planning solution, this session gives you the full picture - live, in Fabric.

GUEST BIO (Gopal Krishnamurthy)👤

Gopal Krishnamurthy is a data and analytics entrepreneur who has been building companies in the space since 2010. He made two career-defining bets: first, pivoting from SAP consulting to cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Power BI) in 2017, which led to his consulting business being acquired by Atos in 2021. Second, betting that future enterprise applications would need to be built natively on top of cloud data platforms, which became the foundation for Lumel.

Today Lumel serves over 3,000 organizations with 400+ employees, is fully bootstrapped from the proceeds of that first exit, and is the #1 Microsoft Power BI AppSource Partner. The company is building a full-stack Enterprise Performance Management suite (planning, BI, and data management) natively on Microsoft Fabric, and was recognized as Best Overall Vendor for EPM by BPM Partners in 2025.

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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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