How to Create a Summary Report in Power BI with AI

Staring at a dashboard full of charts and tables can feel like trying to drink from a fire hose. You have all the data you need, but spotting the actual insights - the "so what?" - is a huge challenge. Thankfully, you can use AI to do the heavy lifting for you. This article will show you exactly how to use Power BI's built-in AI features to create clear, insightful summary reports that practically write themselves.

What Exactly Is a Summary Report?

Think of a summary report as the executive summary for your data. It doesn't show every single data point. Instead, it highlights the most important key performance indicators (KPIs), trends, and takeaways in a simple, easy-to-digest format.

Why are they so valuable? Because nobody has time to spend hours digging through dense reports. A good summary gives executives, stakeholders, and even your own team the high-level information they need to make smart decisions quickly. It answers a few critical questions:

What’s our overall performance at a glance?
Are we hitting our most important targets?
What are the biggest trends or outliers that need attention?

Instead of forcing your audience to connect the dots between ten different charts, a summary report does it for them, making your data more accessible and impactful.

Meet Your AI Assistants in Power BI

Microsoft has embedded several powerful AI features directly into Power BI that are perfect for creating summary reports. These tools analyze your data behind the scenes and serve up insights in plain English, saving you an incredible amount of time. Let's look at the main ones.

Smart Narratives

The Smart Narrative visual is a game-changer for data storytelling. This AI-powered tool automatically generates a text-based summary of the visuals on your report page. It scans your charts and graphs, identifies significant trends, and writes a narrative to explain what’s happening in your data. It's like having a data analyst write the key takeaways for you, and it’s fully customizable.

Q&A Visual

Imagine being able to ask your data questions in plain English, just like you would with a colleague. That's what the Q&A visual enables. You can type questions like "what were total sales last quarter?" or "top 5 products by profit," and Power BI will instantly generate a visual or a number answering your question. It’s perfect for adding quick, specific insights to a summary report without having to build a new chart from scratch.

Key Influencers Visual

Sometimes, the most important part of a summary isn't just what happened, but why it happened. The Key Influencers visual helps you uncover the drivers behind a particular metric. For example, it can tell you what factors contributed most to positive customer reviews or what variables influence a customer's likelihood to churn. This provides a powerful, automated root cause analysis that’s perfect for a high-level summary.

Step-by-Step: Building an AI-Powered Summary Report in Power BI

Let’s walk through building a simple sales summary report for an e-commerce business. We'll use AI to generate most of the insights for us.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready

For any report, you need clean, well-structured data. Make sure your data source (whether it's an Excel sheet, a CRM export, or a database) has clear column headers like "Order Date," "Product Category," "Sales Amount," and "Region." Power BI's AI features work best when they can easily understand what each field represents. For this example, let's assume we have a basic sales dataset loaded into Power BI.

Step 2: Create a Few Core Visuals

Before AI can summarize anything, it needs something to summarize. Start by creating a few essential visuals to form the foundation of your report. You don't need a lot, just enough to show the key aspects of your data.

Let's add three simple charts:

Sales by Product Category: A basic bar chart showing total sales for each category.
Sales Over Time: A line chart displaying sales trends month over month.
Sales by Region: A map visual showing which regions generate the most revenue.

Your report page should now have a clean, intuitive layout with these core visuals.

Step 3: Generate an Instant Report Summary with Smart Narratives

Now for the fun part. Let's get AI to write our summary.

In the Visualizations pane, find and click the Smart Narrative icon. It looks like a text box with a small lightning bolt.
Power BI will instantly add a text box to your report and automatically generate a summary of all the visuals on the page.

You’ll get text that looks something like this:

“At $12.5M, Sum of Sales was highest in March 2024 and lowest in January 2024 at $7.5M. The ‘Accessories’ product category drove the most sales with $15.2M, while ‘Software’ had the lowest at $4.8M. The United States had the highest sales at $31M.”

Just like that, you have a written summary of your entire report, highlighting the highs, lows, and top performers. You can drag and position this text box at the top of your report to serve as an instant TL,DR (Too Long, Didn't Read).

Pro Tip: Customize Your Narrative

This automated text is a great start, but you can make it even better. Click inside the text box, and you'll be able to edit the narrative like any other text. You can even add your own dynamic values. For example, you can type "Our total revenue was " and then click the + Value button to add a calculated value. You can then ask a question like "total sales" in plain English, and Power BI will insert the number field, which will update automatically as your data refreshes.

Step 4: Answer Specific Questions with the Q&A Visual

Let's say a manager looks at your report and asks, "This is great, but what about our top-performing day last month?" Instead of digging back into the data, you can build this capability right into your report.

In the Visualizations pane, click the Q&A icon.
A Q&A box will appear on your report. It will even suggest a few questions to get you started.
Click into the box and type a question in plain English. For example: “top day by sales last month”.

Power BI will instantly give you the answer. You can then convert this answer into a standard visual by clicking the icon in the top-right corner of the Q&A box. This allows you to add specific, ad-hoc insights to your dashboard that directly answer key business questions.

Step 5: Find the "Why" with the Key Influencers Visual

Our final AI component will help us go beyond the what and into the why.

Let’s say we have customer satisfaction data (e.g., a "Rating" from 1-5 stars) in our dataset and we want to know what drives high ratings.

In the Visualizations pane, click the Key Influencers icon.
Drag the metric you want to understand, like "Rating," into the Analyze field.
Drag the factors you think might influence it, such as "Product Category," "Delivery Time," and "Was Discounted," into the Explain by field.

The visual will analyze the data and present a summary of what influences your ratings. It might say something like "When Delivery Time is ‘Under 2 days,’ the likelihood of a rating being 5 stars increases by 2.1x." This provides an incredibly clear and powerful summary of the factors that are actually moving the needle on your KPIs.

Best Practices for Creating Effective AI Summaries

Using these tools is easy, but using them effectively requires a bit of thought. Here are a few tips:

Know Your Audience: A summary for a CEO should focus on high-level profitability and growth. A summary for a marketing manager should focus on campaign ROI and an operations lead on efficiency metrics. Always tailor the visuals and the Smart Narrative to what your audience cares about most.
Combine AI and Human Insight: The AI-generated narrative is a fantastic starting point, but don't just leave it as-is. Add your own voice, context, and recommendations. Use the AI to describe the data, then add a sentence explaining what the team should do about it.
Don't Be Afraid to Edit: Every so often, an auto-generated narrative might sound a little clunky or state something that's obvious. Feel free to revise, delete, or rephrase it to make it more impactful and human-readable.
Let It Do the Grunt Work: Your time is better spent on strategy and analysis, not calculating numbers. Let Power BI’s AI-powered assistants handle the tedious work of summarizing performance and identifying key drivers, freeing you up to focus on making smart decisions with those insights.

Final Thoughts

Power BI's AI features are more than just fancy gadgets, they're powerful assistants that can fundamentally change how you build and share reports. By using tools like Smart Narratives, Q&A, and Key Influencers, you can move away from dense datasheets and create summary reports that are clear, insightful, and actionable for anyone to read.

While Power BI is incredibly capable, we know that there’s still a significant learning curve. If you want to get instant answers from your data without spending hours arranging visuals and learning DAX, you might appreciate the way we approach data analysis. At Graphed , you simply connect your marketing and sales platforms - like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce - and then just ask questions. You can tell us to "build a dashboard summarizing my marketing funnel" or "show me which ad campaigns drove the most Shopify revenue last month," and we'll instantly create the entire report for you, powered by live data.