Now in its fifth year, the Power BI & Fabric Summit is a multi-day event bringing speakers from the Microsoft product group, community experts, and MVPs from all around the world.
I presented two sessions at the conference:
1) Building a credit rating model in Power BI
This session explored how to transform an Excel-based credit rating model for countries into an interactive and scalable report using Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. Participants learn techniques to modernise complex financial models and leverage the advanced capabilities of Power BI for analysis and storytelling, exploring the following areas:
• Replicating Complex Rating Logic: Translating intricate credit rating formulas and logic from Excel into DAX to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Interactive Comparisons: Using slicers, bookmarks, and contextual visualizations to compare local authorities and identify key drivers of credit ratings.
• Enhanced Reporting: Designing an intuitive and user-friendly interface that allows stakeholders to explore the data and insights interactively.
• Scalability with Fabric: Integrating the model into Microsoft Fabric to enable data pipelines, metadata management, and collaboration for enterprise use. 
The Excel files and Power BI report are available as a portfolio solution here
2) Transform your finance function with Power BI, Fabric, ChatGPT, Copilot and AI Skills!
There is no doubt that the Microsoft data analytics and Gen AI platforms can help you re-imagine processes and re-invent an entire business function like Finance. But how? Whilst an interactive Power BI report (replacing the manual month end board pack for example) is an essential part of a solution, it is not likely to be enough by itself, especially in the age of stakeholders expecting Gen AI! Instead you need to go through a methodical approach of understanding your data, capturing stakeholder requirements (functional and non functional!), using these to design a star schema semantic model, developing data engineering processes to shape and clean data, enriching your model with measures and metadata and then designing prompt engineering to train Copilot/a custom RAG model on your data! That’s a lot of work! Fortunately, Copilot and ChatGPT can help with every single step once you’re working in the AI Powered platform of Microsoft Fabric! In this session I showed an example of Income Statement reporting being taken through this process, all with minimal code and just enough effort to make this an example use case that can be completed in days and weeks rather than months and years.
The contents of this session are also available as a 1 hour e-learning course here