Explicit Measures Podcast

Mike & Tommy tackle the question of whether Power BI should stay an analytics layer or evolve into an operational one, joined by Mike Zack — former CEO of Acterys, now part of Vena — who has built his career around closing the gap between insight and action. They weigh in on when write-back genuinely belongs in a report, who owns the data once users can change it, and what governance has to exist before you flip that switch.With AI surfacing signals faster than ever, the real bottleneck may not be the dashboard — it's the disconnected workflow that follows it.More on Mike Zack and the tools discussed: What's New in Microsoft OneLake | Microsoft & Snowflake's Commitment to Apache | What's New in Fabric Data FactoryGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy dive into the biggest announcements from FabCon Barcelona, breaking down how Fabric IQ, agentic app creation, ontology authoring, and a wave of platform updates are reshaping what Power BI and Fabric mean for everyday BI teams. They tackle whether the semantic model has officially become the center of the Microsoft AI universe, and what orgs need to do right now to be ready.From write-back apps built with natural language to zero-provisioned Fabric and on-demand billing, they weigh in on which features deserve a spot on your 90-day roadmap and which ones need more governance guardrails before anyone touches them.Read more: FabCon & SQLCon 2026 in Barcelona | Power BI's Next Chapter | Power BI September 2026 Feature Summary | Fabric September 2026 Feature SummaryGet in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy dive into why choosing the right AI model is one of the most consequential decisions a Power BI or Fabric team can make—and why most teams aren't making it deliberately at all. They explore the tension between cost, capability, and governance: when a frontier model is worth it, when a cheaper one is more than enough, and why letting a model review its own DAX is a governance risk hiding in plain sight.For more, check out the main topic and recent Fabric news below: https://tabulareditor.com/blog/picking-the-ai-model-for-the-task https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/blog/fbc_fabricupdatesblogs/connecting-apps-databases-and-ai-on-one-foundation-new-innovations-at-sqlcon-and/5369538 https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/blog/fbc_fabricupdatesblogs/bringing-governed-analytics-into-the-flow-of-work-fabric-analytics-at-fabcon-eur/5368918Get in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy are joined one last time by Kurt Buhler as they dive into the agentic development of Power BI reports, wrestling with why generating a governed dashboard is so much harder than spinning up a web app or 3D model, and whether that friction is a platform problem, a data problem, or a skills problem.They tackle the biggest misconceptions teams have when pitching agentic BI internally, debate whether dashboards are headed toward becoming ephemeral artifacts, and make their most realistic predictions for what the BI landscape looks like at the edge and in the enterprise core one to two years from now.Also in the news: Fabric Quest and What Does It Mean to Make Data AI Ready?Get in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Mike & Tommy are joined again by Kurt Buhler to tackle whether calling yourself a "Power BI person" is quietly capping your career in the age of AI, exploring how an AI-powered workflow expands your lens beyond a single tool to the full BI and application space, and why that shift should feel like liberation, not a threat.They dig into who gets empowered versus who feels replaced, and what it really means to add value when AI is handling more of the build.Links: https://meetu.ps/e/Q9Sv6/wL2WS/i | https://promptingbi.com/2026/09/21/a-skill-md-is-not-wisdom/Get in touch:Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page.Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitipsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVvSubscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎Check Out Community Jam: https://jam.powerbi.tipsFollow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/