Conversational AI in action: introducing Ask Your Data
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Ask Your Data
Our conversational AI solution built to embed AI directly into Power BI experiences. It’s our answer to a fundamental question: how can we make business intelligence truly accessible for everyday users?
Why we built Ask Your Data
Despite years of investment in business intelligence, only 29% of employees use BI tools daily (IBM). We’ve seen this firsthand – even when Power BI reports are thoughtfully designed and data-rich, many users still hesitate to engage with them.
What gets in the way? Often, it’s not the quality of the report – it’s the barrier of complexity. Not every user feels confident navigating filters, slicers, and drill-downs. Many don’t know where to look for the answer they need – or even if it’s there. This leads to bottlenecks, repeated questions to IT, and ultimately, missed opportunities to act on insights.
Ask Your Data (AYDA) transforms BI into a natural language experience. Users don’t need to understand data models or learn the report layout. Instead, they can simply ask questions – in plain language – and get instant, contextual responses. No technical training required. No long email threads asking for help.
AYDA is built to:
- Empower non-technical users to interact with BI in a more intuitive way.
- Increase adoption of existing Power BI assets by removing the friction.
- Enable cross-report queries – surfacing answers that span multiple sources.
- Provide domain-specific responses by customizing the assistant’s knowledge.
- Generate visualizations on demand – including charts, summaries, and metrics.
- Seamlessly integrate company-specific knowledge not found in the report itself.
And all of this happens in a way that respects user permissions, security policies, and data governance requirements. From sales managers to ESG analysts, users can find their answers faster – and more independently.
The architecture behind the experience
Under the hood, Ask Your Data is both cloud-agnostic and model-flexible. While we typically deploy using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, we can integrate other models – eg. AWS-based solutions – to match client preferences or architecture needs.
AYDA is not a static product – it’s a fully configurable assistant, adaptable in tone, logic, behavior, and data access. It can:
- Connect to external knowledge bases (like KPI definitions, internal documentation, or compliance policies).
- Be embedded within Power BI or accessed externally via Teams or other tools.
- Use secure, context-rich architecture for reliable, real-time answers.
Compared to native tools like Power BI Copilot, AYDA offers more control, flexibility, and customization. It’s designed to meet real enterprise needs – especially when businesses require transparency, scalability, or tailored user experiences.
But even the smartest assistant is only as good as the foundation it stands on. That’s why we emphasize what we outlined in Article 3: a successful conversational BI implementation requires clean semantic models, well-structured data, and enterprise-level governance.
We’re also actively working on model evaluation frameworks to help business users understand where answers come from and how reliable they are. It’s not enough for AI to respond – it must also build trust.
Endless use cases, built around the user
Ask Your Data isn’t limited to one report, one department, or even one tool. Its real strength lies in how flexibly it can be deployed.
In Power BI, AYDA enhances traditional dashboards – letting users ask follow-up questions without needing to explore filters. We’ve tested this successfully in sales reporting, where users can get quick answers without formal training.
Ask Your Data isn’t limited to one report, one department, or even one tool. Its real strength lies in how flexibly it can be deployed.
In Power BI, AYDA enhances traditional dashboards – letting users ask follow-up questions without needing to explore filters. We’ve tested this successfully in sales reporting, where users can get quick answers without formal training.
But AYDA doesn’t stop at BI tools. It can be deployed in Microsoft Teams, giving employees access to insights without opening a report at all. We’re even exploring voice-based queries, allowing users to ask questions verbally – turning data access into something as natural as conversation.
AYDA has also been used in new domains. One of the most exciting applications is “Talk to Your Research,” where users analyze survey data or open-text responses conversationally – summarizing themes, extracting key findings, and interacting with qualitative data in a whole new way.
Across every use case, our goal is the same:
- Lower the barrier to insight.
- Personalize the AI to the user and the context.
- Shift the BI paradigm from clicking to conversing.
Ask Your Data is more than just an assistant — it’s a bridge between business users and the insights they need. It’s how we make BI accessible, conversational, and actionable, no matter the user’s role or technical background.
Think about your current BI landscape:
● Are your reports truly accessible to every business user?
● Can your teams ask and answer questions without technical support?
● Is your data ready for a conversational AI assistant?
If you’d like to explore how Ask Your Data can support your AI-driven BI journey – let’s talk.
- Key takeaways
- Ask Your Data bridges the gap between non-technical users and complex BI tools using conversational AI.
- The solution supports flexible architecture, integrates multiple models, and respects enterprise-level data governance.
- AYDA enables natural language insights, chart creation, and report-independent access – even through Microsoft Teams.
- A successful implementation still depends on clean semantic models and ongoing trust-building through model evaluation.
Wiktor Zdzienicki
Senior Portfolio Lead
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