27/09/2026
Last Thursday I attended the Power BI User Group Italy meetup, and it was worth every minute. 📊
Part 1: August update with Victor Rivas 🥇
Victor walked us through the highlights of the Power BI August release. My top 3:
🔹 Calculated columns in Direct Lake: DAX columns without changing storage mode or touching the source
🔹 PBIP + VS Code: edit your project outside Desktop and reload changes instantly
🔹 OneLake images: use images stored in OneLake directly in your visuals
Part 2: AI in Power BI with super Marco Russo
Marco ran a simple but powerful experiment. He gave an AI the same task at 3 levels of prompting, from almost no instructions (vague do measures) to almost full business context. The dataset covered subscriptions and active users.
The result was striking. With cloude code, only the last level, where the AI understood the business behind the data, produced the right measures and a correct star schema. While other levels were not bad compared to last year’s AI performance it has made around 10% mistake that most BI users might make at first instinct.
My takeaway: AI doesn’t replace understanding the business. Context is what turns AI output into a real model.
Part 3: the best part 🍝
We closed the evening with dinner together, a table full of BI analysts talking data, models, and ideas. That’s what community is about.
Thank you to the Power BI User Group Italy for organizing, and to Victor and Marco for the great sessions.
Thanks to Rebecca Riponti Adelia Akhmetianova and @
PowerBIUserGroup BusinessIntelligence
