I did my MCP Servers for Conversational BI presentation from the perspective of a BI Developer familiar with the Microsoft BI stack. However, there is something unsaid during the whole presentation.
We can take Power BI’s front end out of the equation
We are now effectively able to take the front end of Power BI out of the toolkit we’re using to create reports. I’m not saying this is something we should do, but creating HTML reports gives us much more flexibility in terms of what we can create and it’s not that difficult to see how we could set up our own “Power BI Front End Service” without a huge amount of effort.
It also begs the question — what about the semantic model? We have options like DuckDB for simply using CSV files. These options allow us to build a semantic model on another technology completely and no longer rely on the Vertipaq engine for speed or DAX to define measures.
Stack agnosticism
You may have noticed Tabular Editor creating the ability to convert Databricks models over to MS Semantic Models. It’s possible that a company could position themselves to allow us to be much more technology and stack agnostic.
For me this has always been an aim from higher ups in management that is in reality a fantasy because of how much work goes into creating a BI estate. But with the rate of change of these tools I don’t see this being out of the question at all.
Where Microsoft keeps its edge
This is also where I see a company like Microsoft keeping its USP — they are integrated vertically across many enterprise companies which gives them the benefit of being able to integrate chat platforms, emails, identity with each other.
See also importance of the semantic model and what this means for reports.