Microsoft Integrates Cortana Into Its Power BI Business Intelligence Service

When Microsoft has a technology it likes, it loves to bring it to all of its platforms and services. Right now, its Cortana personal assistant is clearly one of these technologies. Microsoft today announced that Cortana is coming to more desktops in the enterprise. The company is integrating the service into Power BI, its business intelligence tool that, it’s worth noting, already had some natural language query capabilities.

Once connected, Cortana can now answer questions from your Power BI data sets for written and spoken queries like “revenue for the last quarter” or draw you a chart for the “number of opportunities by team.”

Users have to ensure that Cortana has access to their Power BI data sets by enabling this new feature in Power BI. It’s also worth noting that this only works if you are running Windows 10 version 1511 or higher.1057.01

With Cortana Analytics, Microsoft also currently offers a more bespoke solution for enterprises that focuses less on the Cortana client and more on the machine learning and automation services that power Cortana.