PODCAST · business
Explicit Measures Podcast
by PowerBI.Tips
Hosted by Mike Carlo, and Tommy Puglia, the Explicit Measures Podcast is a Power BI focused show that is like being around a Power BI Pro’s Water Cooler. With so many available resources in the community that focuses on the “how” in Power BI (how to do Drill Through, how to use DAX, etc.,), the Explicit Measures Podcast is all around the WHY. Why use a particular feature, does it make sense for my users? Build the toolset, learn the how, and then come to the Podcast to the listen to the why in situations we all experience as Power BI Pros.
Episodes
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572: Does the Ontology Agent Change Our Minds?
Mike & Tommy weigh in on the Fabric IQ Ontology Agent, exploring whether a conversational interface built on structured business definitions finally makes ontology worth the investment—or just adds another layer for BI teams to govern. They break down the real cost of building and maintaining an...
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571: Fabric Notebook Toolkit - Measuring the Impact
Mike & Tommy dive into the Fabric Notebook Toolkit (FNTK), a Python library that makes end-to-end agentic development of Microsoft Fabric Notebooks possible from GitHub Copilot CLI, OpenAI Codex, and Claude Code. They break down whether putting AI agents in the driver's seat of notebook creation...
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570: PADU & Fabric
Mike & Tommy tackle PADU — Preferred, Accepted, Discouraged, and Unacceptable — and map the four-bucket framework onto Microsoft Fabric, exploring how teams can bring real governance and process architecture to a platform that gives you five ways to do everything. They weigh in on where…
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569: Signal & Reporting - Write Back Belongs Where?
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...
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568: FabCon Barcelona - Feature Draft
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...
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567: Picking the Right Model for the Task
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…
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566: Agentic Dev of PBI Reports
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...
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565: Your Identity is Bigger Than Power BI
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…
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564: Data Literacy in the AI Era
Mike & Tommy are joined again by Kurt Buhler and tackle the intersection of data literacy and AI literacy, exploring how self-awareness — or the lack of it — shapes the way teams build and consume Power BI and Microsoft Fabric solutions. They dig into whether AI raises the floor while lowering…
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563: Fabric Apps Fit into the PBI World
Mike & Tommy are joined by Kurt Buhler as they dive into Fabric Apps and where they actually fit in the Power BI world, weighing whether they replace traditional reports, who owns them in a real org, and whether low code is getting cornered by AI agents. They break down the pre-requirements for...
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562: The Fabric Handoff
Mike & Tommy tackle the Fabric handoff — exploring what it really takes to transition a Microsoft Fabric environment to an organization with no prior Fabric experience, and whether the real challenge is the platform or the change management behind it. They break down who needs to own Fabric after...
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561: Using AI for Data Viz
Mike & Tommy dive into how AI is actually changing data visualization work, exploring whether the real unlock is iteration speed rather than AI-built visuals, and why the "no enterprise license required" reality matters more than keynote promises. They tackle the governance risk of analysts using...
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560: Data Agents Got an Upgrade
Mike & Tommy break down the latest upgrades to Fabric Data Agents—MCP integration, OneLake Catalog discovery, multi-agent support, and Foundry Observability—and explore whether these changes finally move Data Agents from demo to production-ready. They weigh in on the real tension: whether easier...
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559: What is Liquid Clustering?
Mike & Tommy dive into Liquid Clustering in Microsoft Fabric, breaking down why Runtime 2.0 changes it from an experimental feature into the default table layout strategy for Lakehouse workloads. They explore how incremental clustering solves the write amplification problems that plagued Runtime...
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558: Has Your Medallion Patterns Changed?
Mike & Tommy dive into whether medallion architecture has truly evolved in the Fabric era or whether teams are just re-labeling Bronze, Silver, and Gold with new icons, using this Microsoft Fabric community article as a jumping-off point. They break down when an all-in-one Warehouse pattern makes...
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557: LLMs: What Data Viz Teaches Us
Mike & Tommy dive into what data visualization can teach us about critically evaluating LLMs, exploring why fluent, polished AI output can be just as misleading as a beautiful but inaccurate chart. They break down the tension between AI speed and data quality, tackling how BI teams can build a...
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556: Power BI Desktop Bridge Tips
Mike & Tommy dive into Power BI Desktop Bridge, breaking down what it actually solves, where it fits in your stack alongside Desktop, Service, Fabric, Git, and deployment pipelines, and what it really takes to make it run like a Ferrari for your team. They tackle the hard questions — whether...
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555: Anonymous Rayfin Fabric Apps
Mike & Tommy dive into anonymous data access in Fabric Apps, exploring how the new capability lets builders deliver public-facing BI experiences without requiring users to sign in — and whether that's a governance breakthrough or a disaster waiting to happen. They break down which items support…
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554: Fabric as a Backend (FaaB)
Mike & Tommy dive into the emerging pattern of Fabric as a Backend (FaaB), exploring whether Fabric is becoming the default way teams think about their entire data ecosystem or just a front-facing adoption tool. They weigh in on whether this pattern is a natural evolution of the platform or a…
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553: Crawl, Walk, Run with Agentic Power BI Assets
Mike & Tommy dive into what agentic development actually means for Power BI teams, breaking down the crawl, walk, run framework for safely adopting AI agents across BI assets. They explore why the shift goes far beyond Copilot prompts, how semantic models become the center of the conversation…
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552: Talking Power BI Desktop Bridge
Mike & Tommy dive into the Power BI Desktop Bridge preview, exploring how this new local API surface lets external tools and AI agents interact directly with a running Desktop session — and whether that changes report authoring forever. They break down the Report Authoring Skill showcase, weigh…
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551: Return of the Composite Model
Mike & Tommy tackle the hub-and-spoke composite model pattern, weighing in on whether splitting a bloated golden semantic model into a core hub with department-specific spokes delivers real simplification or just trades one problem for another. Prompted by Austin's question about avoiding a 100+...
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550: The State Business Intelligence Platforms in the Age of AI
Mike & Tommy dive into the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI, breaking down what Microsoft's 19th consecutive Leader recognition actually means in an era where every vendor claims to be AI-first. They explore whether the real story is Power BI, Fabric, or the broader Microsoft...
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549: Training Jr Staff on Agents for DAX
Mike & Tommy tackle a question every data team manager is wrestling with: should junior staff learn DAX fundamentals before touching agentic AI tools, or can they dive straight in? Drawing from a listener in the insurance industry who manages a data team, they explore the tension between building...
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548: Can We Trust AI Pipelines
Mike & Tommy tackle the uncomfortable truth about AI-generated data pipelines — how code that looks clean and runs without errors can still deliver confidently wrong results. Drawing from this article, they explore why silent failures in joins, filters, and business rules are harder to catch than...
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547: The Hype of RayFin
Mike & Tommy dive into Microsoft's RayFin, weighing in on whether this new code-first app experience inside Fabric is a genuine shift in how teams deliver data insights — or just another layer of hype. They explore the tension between RayFin and Power BI reports, tackle who actually owns these…
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546: Teaching Orgs to Question Themselves
Mike & Tommy dive into why data literacy might be missing its most important lesson — not how to read a chart, but how to question the story it's telling. Drawing from a Nightingale article on graph literacy and self-skepticism, they explore whether polished dashboards are quietly building…
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545: Agents Helping with Data Governance
Mike & Tommy tackle whether AI agents can solve what the Power BI admin portal can't—giving you a true tenant-level, workspace-free view of who can access what in Fabric. They break down Taylor B.'s real-world agent that stitches together audit logs, model APIs, grants, direct links, and app...
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544: Using Harnesses for Fabric Projects
Mike & Tommy tackle the often-overlooked "outer context" problem in agentic Fabric development — exploring why request tracking systems like Notion, GitHub Issues, or even ADO matter more than most teams realize, and how building a proper project harness could be the difference between an agent...
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543: Tracking App Usage in Fabric
Mike & Tommy tackle the surprisingly tricky problem of tracking Power BI app usage at scale, exploring why app-level telemetry is harder to surface than report-level metrics and how teams can map usage back to districts using Entra ID, Admin APIs, and audit logs. They break down which telemetry...
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542: Orgs Slow on AI Adoption
Mike & Tommy tackle why organizations are still dragging their feet on AI adoption even with Microsoft Fabric sitting right in front of them — weighing in on whether the real blockers are skills, data quality, governance, or just unclear ROI. They break down what "AI-ready" actually looks like in…
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541: Helping Leaders Speak Data
Mike & Tommy tackle the question of whether it's time to hold CEOs and CFOs accountable for data literacy, not just the analysts building the reports. Inspired by a mailbag from jedc at bi.fo, they explore why leaders so often ask for A when the business actually needs B, and what it really takes...
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540: Self Service with AI Part 2 - Governance, Skills, & Validation
Mike & Tommy dive into the second half of the AI self-service analytics story, tackling governance, skills, and validation — and why giving everyone the ability to ask questions of data raises the stakes, not just the speed. They break down what a "Skill" actually means in Power BI terms, who…
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539: Self Service Analytics with AI
Mike & Tommy dive into self-service analytics with AI, exploring how tools like Claude are changing the way business users interact with data — and whether speed and access come at the cost of trust and governance. They break down what semantic models need to look like when chat is the primary...
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538: Team vs Individual Microsoft Fabric Agent skills
Mike & Tommy tackle the growing tension between individual and team-owned Microsoft Fabric Agent Skills, exploring how BI teams should organize, govern, and promote skills without killing innovation or creating shadow BI. They break down the full skill lifecycle — from personal experiments to...
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537: Are We Now Professional QA?
Mike & Tommy tackle whether Power BI developers are quietly becoming professional QA testers in the age of Microsoft MCP, weighing in on what separates a true senior developer from a junior when AI writes the first draft. They explore how the developer role is shifting, who owns accountability…
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536: All About RayFin
Mike & Tommy dive into RayFin, Microsoft's new AI-first product for building, deploying, and governing agents inside Microsoft Fabric, exploring whether this is a true shift in how BI teams work or just another layer of hype on day one. They break down what RayFin actually changes for semantic...
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535: Microsoft Build 2026 Recap
Mike & Tommy dive into Microsoft Build 2026, breaking down what the "agentic apps" announcement actually means for Power BI and Fabric teams—and whether this is a real architecture shift or just rebranded copilots. They weigh in on how Fabric Data Factory orchestration, Microsoft Databases, and...
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534: CI/CD Automation with Agents in Fabric
Mike & Tommy dive into CI/CD automation with agents in Microsoft Fabric, exploring how agentic workflows are reshaping deployment pipelines, whether AI-driven deployments introduce more speed or more risk, and what guardrails teams need before letting agents touch production workspaces....
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533: Claude Design & Power BI Embedded
Mike & Tommy dive into Claude Design meets Power BI Embedded, exploring whether AI-generated UX is a shortcut or a quality risk, how semantic models stay the source of truth when LLMs scaffold embedded apps, and what guardrails belong on every AI-assisted analytics project....
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531: You are Wasting your Time!
Mike & Tommy tackle Microsoft Fabric hints to work faster, exploring whether teams are wasting time due to self-inflicted bad workflows, poor reuse, and confusing busy work with shipping value. They break down which repeatable tasks should be standardized first, when "just build it" becomes...
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530: Agentic Skill & Report Design
Mike & Tommy explore agentic skill and report design, diving into the "Five Minutes to Wow" framework and whether AI agents accelerate great design or amplify bad habits. They confront questions about who owns design decisions when the AI makes the call, how to balance speed with craftsmanship…
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529: Does AI Drive Your CoE?
Mike & Tommy dive into whether agentic tooling should be driving your Knowledge Center, exploring if docs, support, and governance content can—or should—be fully automated by AI, and what that means for the future relevance of your CoE. Get in touch: Send in your questions or topics you want us…
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528: The Importance of Skills for the Fabric Developer
Mike & Tommy explore the importance of agentic skills for the Fabric developer, weighing whether Skills are a productivity breakthrough or another governance risk, and discussing how to build, version, and share Skills without sacrificing engineering discipline....
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527: Semantics Layer Genie & Data Agents
Mike & Tommy dive into Databricks Genie and the growing hype around data agents, exploring whether the real challenge is natural language chat or the semantic layer underneath—and what Power BI teams must fix before any AI agent can deliver trusted, governed answers at scale....
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526: Stop Using Bookmarks
Mike & Tommy weigh in on whether bookmarks in Power BI are still worth the maintenance burden, exploring how field parameters, slicers, and modern features have changed the game, and when you should still reach for bookmarks versus simplifying your data model instead....
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525: Less Guessing? More Building!
Mike & Tommy dive into Building Agentic Tools for Microsoft Fabric With Alex Powers, exploring Microsoft's Alex Powers' new tool 'Taskflow Assistant' for Microsoft Fabric and how AI is transforming the way professionals work with Fabric workflows, discussing whether we're helping users master the...
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524: Our Most Underrated Fabric Features
Mike and Tommy review the most underrated Fabric features based on buzz and client usage 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:...
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520: Overfed and Sick Golden Datasets
Mike & Tommy tackle the overfed golden dataset problem—when a single "source of truth" becomes a 100-table, 400-measure monster that takes four minutes to open. They explore why teams fall into the trap of cramming everything into one model, how fear of discrepant numbers drives...
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519: Tools & Strategies for Marketing Insights Integration
This week on Explicit Measures, we tackle a critical "last mile" problem in Business Intelligence: how do you add narrative context to Power BI reports when the storytellers aren't Power BI users? Our listener has built monthly snapshot reports delivered to multiple business units, but marketing...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Hosted by Mike Carlo, and Tommy Puglia, the Explicit Measures Podcast is a Power BI focused show that is like being around a Power BI Pro’s Water Cooler. With so many available resources in the community that focuses on the “how” in Power BI (how to do Drill Through, how to use DAX, etc.,), the Explicit Measures Podcast is all around the WHY. Why use a particular feature, does it make sense for my users? Build the toolset, learn the how, and then come to the Podcast to the listen to the why in situations we all experience as Power BI Pros.
HOSTED BY
PowerBI.Tips
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Explicit Measures Podcast have?
Explicit Measures Podcast currently has 571 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Explicit Measures Podcast about?
Hosted by Mike Carlo, and Tommy Puglia, the Explicit Measures Podcast is a Power BI focused show that is like being around a Power BI Pro’s Water Cooler. With so many available resources in the community that focuses on the “how” in Power BI (how to do Drill Through, how to use DAX, etc.,), the...
How often does Explicit Measures Podcast release new episodes?
Explicit Measures Podcast releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 571 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Explicit Measures Podcast?
You can listen to Explicit Measures Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Explicit Measures Podcast?
Explicit Measures Podcast is created and hosted by PowerBI.Tips.
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