PowerBI Chatbots Archives - BotCore

Building A Power BI Chatbot Using Power Virtual Agents

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 12:31:00 +0000

Building A Power BI Chatbot Using Power Virtual Agents

Have you ever wondered if accessing data from Power BI can be made faster? And manually skimming through various dashboards and filtering the unwanted information might not be the only way to get the required data? If yes, then integrating chatbots with Power BI might just be what you are looking for. Sounds interesting, right?

Chatbots add an element of conversation to your Power BI experience. Through text or voice commands, they help fetch information quickly and send key metrics, reports, and dashboards to your email or messaging app. In this way, they make data consumption easier within your organization.

This blog will discuss the current challenges in accessing Power BI data, the benefits of chatbot-Power BI integration, and why you must consider building your Power BI chatbots using Power Virtual Agents (PVA).

Power BI: Challenges to accessing data

Managers and leaders need to track and analyze critical business data at the right time for informed decision-making.

Imagine being asked for a significant business metric that you don’t have access to in the midst of your client meeting. As discussed above, traditional methods would require you to open your Power BI app, navigate through dashboards, and filter the unnecessary details to generate the desired number. All this is not only time-consuming but may also leave your client with a sour impression.

Conclusion – All your employees must always have the required data at their fingertips!

Many organizations hire staff exclusively to take screenshots of reports and send them to managers. However, the images are neither interactive nor updated. In such a scenario, chatbots integrated within your BI app help employees conduct natural language conversations via text or voice to get the required data instantly.

For example, the employee may ask, “What were the sales for product X in 2019?”

Or, he may request the bot to show a graph of operating expenses for the last five years. Additionally, the employee might say, “Please email me this graph.”

In short, AI-enabled chatbots integrated with your Power BI app can conduct conversations with your employees, fetch the required data from the back end, and respond via text or rich multimedia formats, including images, graphs, pie-charts, etc.

Additionally, the separate Q&A feature that comes with Power BI is limited in the sense that it delivers search results solely on the basis of the exact keywords used in the search. However, a Power BI chatbot uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to produce results based on the employee’s intent and the identified entities and does not limit itself to keywords.

Benefits of chatbot-Power BI integration

1. Reduced manual effort increases productivity

With a Power BI chatbot, employees no longer need to scroll through manually and filter dashboards to get the data they need. They simply need to request the required data, and the bot will draw it from the backend.

2. Personalized information

No employee is burdened with unnecessary data as the bot can send customized information from the same report/dashboard based on an employee’s role, geography, etc.

3. Flexibility

Employees can access information anytime and anywhere from their smartphones through commonly used enterprise messaging apps. The bot can respond in text or use rich visual media like graphs and images, as seen above. Depending on the user’s request, it can send charts and links to reports or graphs on his/her email id. Thus, there is flexibility in how the staff views information.

Users can also set alerts when certain KPIs cross a predetermined threshold or show a significant deflection from the normal.

What is Power Virtual Agents (PVA)?

Before delving further into building a Power BI chatbot using Power Virtual Agents (PVA), let’s first understand what PVA is.

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a low-code SaaS platform by Microsoft that helps build and deploy chatbots in the shortest span of time. Since it’s hosted on Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, organizations need not invest heavily into providing a conducive infrastructure to maintain the chatbots.

With its graphical interface and minimalistic coding requirements, PVA allows both pro and citizen developers alike to build bots, making it user-friendly for all. Moreover, chatbot performance can be continually monitored on an AI-driven dashboard and improved for higher returns.

Most importantly, since both Power Virtual Agents and Power BI are part of Microsoft’s Power platform, organizations need not depend on external vendors for chatbot development and enjoy a seamless integration experience.

Advantages of building your Power BI chatbot on Power Virtual Agents

1. Lowers development costs

Recruiting professional software developers proves heavier on the cost side. However, even novice developers can quickly build and deploy a chatbot with low-code development, reducing development costs by up to 90%.

2. Faster chatbot deployment

Since PVA is a low-code platform, bots can be deployed within a matter of a few weeks. Moreover, it promotes innovation as domain-experts can develop their own bots without depending on coders.

3. Integrates with existing data systems and apps

PVA integrates with existing cloud-based and on-premise systems and third-party apps, such as your CRM and LoB apps, giving organizations a single-window view into their data.

4. Democratizes chatbot development

By allowing employees with little coding knowledge to develop chatbots, domain experts across functions and departments can customize and build their bots without limiting development to a core team or group of individuals.

How can Acuvate help?

Indeed, Power BI chatbots help decision-makers and leaders access the right data at the right time, accelerate decision-making, and build competitive advantage. Moreover, developing your Power BI bots with Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft’s low-code bot-building platform, allows organizations to deploy their bots quickly and seamlessly. Since Power BI and Power Virtual Agents are a part of Microsoft’s Power Platform, organizations can easily leverage the same tech stack and need not rely on external support.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we at Acuvate help clients develop Power BI chatbots with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents (PVA) and significantly reduce the time needed to access the required information.

To know more about our offering, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our Microsoft and chatbot experts.

The post Building A Power BI Chatbot Using Power Virtual Agents appeared first on BotCore.

Make Power BI Data Consumption Simpler: Integrate Chatbots

Shanawaz Sheriff — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 11:14:51 +0000

How Different CPG Companies Are Using Chatbots To Drive Customer Experience

Integrate chatbots with Power BI – If you’re a Microsoft customer you must be intrigued by this statement. You must be thinking along the lines of…

Is it even possible to integrate a bot with Power BI? How does the Power BI chatbot function? What are the benefits? or PowerBI also has Q&A , Trigger feature, how is it different?

Our short answer is – Yes! With the right chatbot builder platform, you can fully integrate a chatbot with Power BI and simplify data consumption.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have helped several customers achieve this and build a culture of data in their organizations.

Before understanding more about Power BI chatbots, let’s have a quick look at the current state of Power BI users and how they access data.

Current State Of Accessing Power BI Data

The traditional way of accessing data through Power BI (or any BI system for that matter) is by logging into the application, navigating through dashboards, digging through irrelevant data, filtering them and generating the desired report.

Now imagine doing this every time you need a quick insight.

Say, you’re in the middle of a customer meeting and you are asked about a critical sales KPI you didn’t cover in your PPT. Or consider your boss asking for a specific performance metric in a review meeting. Or suppose you’re a C-Suite executive on the road and need a quick revenue KPI to make a significant business decision.

In all these scenarios, you can’t possibly access the needed insight from Power BI on the spur of the moment and as a result the opportunity to make an impact will be lost.

Because of the long drawn process of accessing data, employees won’t be motivated to use data more often in their everyday decision-making and thereby the adoption also decreases. In an age where data is the oil, employees need data at the tip of their fingers.

Integrate Chatbots With Power BI To Simplify Data Consumption

A chatbot is a computer program with artificial intelligence capability that can conduct conversations via auditory or textual methods. While chatbots are all the rage in customer service domains, an additional use case of chatbots is that they can be used to fetch information quickly from an organization’s business intelligence systems, making data access a breeze.

Learn more: Business Intelligence Chatbots

For example, one might simply ask natural language questions like “What are my predicted sales for product X?” and the bot will instantly answer via text or any multimedia format (image, graphs, pie charts etc.) with the relevant information. In order to better understand how this works, look at the following example.

Example:

Nathan is a Sales Manager at ABC Corp who usually travels one location to another to meet multiple customers in the region. Since he is on-the-go, he doesn’t have the time to constantly open the Power BI application, switching dashboards and filtering data. He needs quick granular information at his fingertips.With a sales intelligence chatbot, he can have a quick chat, ask natural language questions about KPIs and also get the required reports.

Here is a quick example:

Nathan is scheduled to meet with the head of Alpha Foods, a long-standing customer of the company. One of the issues that Alpha Foods is facing is a steep decline in sales. Before he walks into the meeting, Nathan wants to be abreast of the company’s revenue and sales data.

He decides to use Mylo, ABC Corp.’s BI chatbot in Slack that is integrated with the company’s Power BI system.

Nathan: Hi Mylo.

Mylo: Hello Nathan. How can I help you today?

Nathan: Show me Alpha Foods’ annual revenue details for last year.

Mylo: Sure. Alpha Foods’ annual revenue for 2017-2018 is 90 Billion.

Nathan: Okay, can you break that down by region?

Mylo: USA – 32B, Asia Pacific region – 35.7B, Europe – 22.3B.

Nathan: Okay, can I see a graphical representation of their sales in the Asia Pacific region?

Mylo: Yes.

Nathan: Well, that doesn’t look good. What about their sales in Europe and the USA?

Mylo: They seem to be doing pretty well there. Sales in Europe have seen an improvement of 6% on average annually. Sales in the USA are on the uprise too – at an average annual rate of 2%.

Nathan: Map sales numbers for Asia Pacific with their trade promotional campaigns from the last 5 years.

Mylo: There are no trade promotions from Alpha in Asia Pacific between the years 2013 – 2018.

Nathan: Okay. Can you mail these figures to me as well?

Mylo: Sure. The details have been sent to your email.

Nathan has understood that Alpha Foods is facing an issue specifically in the Asia Pacific region as they are facing a hard time attracting customers to their products. Nathan uses the data insights provided by Mylo to suggest a new trade promotional campaign to boost sales for Alpha in the Asia Pacific region.

Did you see how easy that was? Now imagine the amount of work it would take for all this data to be generated manually using the traditional Power BI workflow. The vast difference in the convenience factor and speed of fetching relevant data, is what makes chatbot integration with Power BI so desirable. Using the bot, you don’t even have to login to your BI system or switch multiple apps to access the desired analytics and data. In a nutshell, data consumption becomes much easier when a chatbot is integrated with Power BI.

Here’s one more example of a Power BI chatbot:

Power BI Q&A Vs Power BI Chatbot

As you are reading through this article, you might be wondering how a Power BI chatbot is different from Power BI Q&A and what more can a chatbot solution offer. While the Q&A feature of Power BI is effective, a chatbot is even more powerful for access insights. Here’s why:

Q&A feature delivers results solely based on the report/dashboard’s keywords. i.e if any one of the keywords in the user’s query doesn’t match with the values in a dataset, those values will be missed out in search results. Whereas an AI-powered chatbot provides flexibility to use natural language for searching data and delivers relevant results based on intent and entities.
In addition, for using Power BI Q&A feature, users should be fully aware of the data stored in the dashboards so they can use the right keywords in their search query.
Power BI c can also deliver proactive alerts on KPIs. Users can set alerts for their desired KPIs and the chatbot sends an alert message whenever there is a notable deflection to the KPI.

Build A Power BI Chatbot Using Botcore

Acuvate builds Power BI chatbots with our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore. BotCore is powered by Microsoft Bot Framework and is fully deployable into Microsoft Azure and leverages many of the features available in it.

With BotCore’s Power BI bot, you can get data and reports within your third-party messaging applications like Skype For Business, Skype, Slack and many more. This helps users get actionable insights through a conversational interface without having to access the BI software and analyzing information every single time. Instead, with a simple natural language chat with the bot, the required insights can be obtained right within the messaging application.

Here’s a quick demo video of our Power BI bot:

Acuvate is a Gold Certified Partner with Microsoft. It is no wonder then that BotCore’s BI chatbot is the chosen chatbot technology to be integrated with the Microsoft Power BI system.

Some of the features of the our Power BI chatbot, include:

Multi media responses: Bots can respond to users in both text and rich media formats.
Bots can function in both on-premise and cloud
Seamless Integration – BotCore’s Power BI chatbot can seamlessly extract data from various other data systems such as ERP, CRM, LoB and Data warehouses.
Natural Conversations – The chatbot uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) and learns the office jargon.
Real-Time Alerts – The chatbot is also equipped to periodically send key data or analytical updates that are relevant to the user. Especially in case of any data trends, the BI chatbot swiftly updates the user.
Security – BotCore BI chatbots are highly secure and are integrated with various access checkpoints such as User Authentication, User Authorization, Multi-Factor Authentication, One Time Authorization and Channel Authorization.

If you’d like to learn more about our solution, please feel free to get in touch with one of our Power BI and AI experts for a personalized demo!

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The post Make Power BI Data Consumption Simpler: Integrate Chatbots appeared first on BotCore.