AI Powered Visuals - Key Influencers in Power BI
Updated: May 25, 2025
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is prevalent in many applications including data analytics. Let's explore how it can assist us in data analytics. AI in data analytics refers to the use of artificial intelligence to process, analyze and draw insights from large datasets. AI uses powerful machine learning algorithms to process large volumes of data quickly and efficiently.
Power Bi is a business intelligence tool that allows you to connect to various data sources and create interactive dashboards and reports. As we know, data visualization is the graphical representation of data that helps identify insights more clearly. Some example visualizations in Power BI are stacked bar charts, line charts, pie charts and KPIs. Among many features Power BI also includes AI-Powered Visuals. Some examples of these visuals are
· Key Influencer,
· Smart Narrative
· Q&A
Let’s explore the key influencer more in detail.
What is the Key Influencers Visual?
The key influencer visual helps you understand what factors affect a specific value you care about. It analyzes your data, finds the most important factors, and shows them as key influencers.
For Example, considering the Superstore data set which includes Sales, Category, Sub-Category, Profit and other information. Suppose you want to figure out what makes your sales increase or decrease.
To build this visual in Power BI go to visualizations pane. Select the Key Influencers Visual.
In Analyze filed, move the metric you interested in analyzing, here I am selecting the Sales field.
Next, move the fields which you believe could affect the sales to Explain by section. For example moving the Sub-Category filed to Explain by.
After selecting the Sales and Sub-Category, the visual appears. In Key Influencers visual, we can select what influences sales to increase or decrease. Here I have chosen to analyze factors that increase sales.
We can find that all the subcategories that influences an increase in sales, among them, sub-category “Tables” has the highest sales. On the right side you can see the visuals of the sub-categories that increases the sales with the Average sales values. Similarly, if you choose ‘Decrease’ the visual will show which sub-category are linked to a drop in sales. In this case, the sub-category 'Fasteners' is associated with lower sales."
Top Segments
Top Segments are used to see how the combinations of the factors affect the metrics that you are analyzing. This example shows that three segments were identified. Segment 1 has the highest sales of all. Segment 2 has the largest bubble and shows the highest population count.
Selecting the bubble displays the details of that segment. For example, If you select Segment 1, the Sub-Category is Chairs. Chairs have 302.5 units higher sales than the average sales value.
Ultimately, the Key Influencers feature streamlines your workflow and delivers insights in a clear, well-structured format. An advantage of Key Influencers tool is that it is compatible with both categorical and numerical data types.
