Beyond Power BI was one of the most requested sessions we have run, for a simple reason: almost every growing business already lives in Power BI, yet quietly suspects it is not enough. The dashboard looks the part, but the decisions behind it still feel like guesswork. Building the dashboard is the easy bit. The hard part sits in the data behind it, and that is where most businesses get stuck. The fix is to make that data work as one connected source rather than a dozen disconnected reports, which is exactly what Microsoft Fabric is built to do.
If you get the foundations right and focus on what you are trying to achieve, in AI and in surfacing insight, you get an awful lot more out of your business. Simon Fenech, Codestone
The dashboard is not the hard part
Mike Hobson made a point in the session that landed with the room: the visualisation layer, the charts and the colours, is not the difficult part. The difficulty is how the data behind it is modelled. The same data that powers a good report should also be powering your AI, so if your data only ever serves standalone reports, it is usually modelled the wrong way for anything else and often locked away in silos. A reporting problem and an AI problem turn out to be the same problem wearing different clothes. Get the foundation right once, on a single platform like Microsoft Fabric, and you solve both at the same time.
If you are just using your data through Power BI for the sake of reporting, you are missing a big opportunity to do more with AI. Mike Hobson, Codestone
Three signs you have hit the wall
How do you know you have hit that wall? Three signs come up again and again:
- Growth and margin. As you scale, margin becomes more variable or more hidden than it should be, the monthly close drags on, and decisions get made on hindsight rather than on what is happening now.
- Finance sits in one report, operations in another, and your CRM and ERP do not talk to each other, so nobody has a holistic view and confidence in the numbers quietly drops.
- Not being AI-ready. Competitors are already looking at this, and data kept in silos limits what AI can ever do for you.
This is the rule, not the exception. In a 2026 study by Cloudera and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, only 7% of enterprises said their data was completely ready for AI, and 56% blamed siloed data they could not easily join up. If two of those three feel familiar, you are not behind. You are ready for the next step.
Data pains are scaling pains for a business. Mike Hobson, Codestone
The two traps: manual and over-complex
Many businesses I speak to recognise themselves in one of two traps:
- The manual trap. The real heavy lifting still happens in Excel, with Power BI bolted on top as the pretty layer. The month-end pain has not gone anywhere, it is just better dressed.
- The complexity trap. The setup has become so elaborate that only one or two people understand it, so nobody is sure how the numbers were arrived at, or whether to trust them.
Both carry the same risk: fragile reporting and a dangerous dependence on one or two people. If they leave, the insight leaves with them.
Maybe someone in IT is doing something in Python that nobody else understands. I call those the heroic exploits. Someone has done a cracking job, but nobody else has a clue what is going on with it. Mike Hobson, Codestone
Where are you on the maturity curve?
It helps to place yourself on a simple curve. Picture two axes: the business value your analytics gives you, and your capability to support and build on it. Most businesses move through the same stages:
- Raw exports from your ERP into Excel.
- Excel P&L reporting.
- Standalone Power BI reports.
- Data transformed for your specific business context, with an adoption programme behind it so people actually use it.
The aim is to move up and to the right: more value, more capability, less reliance on heroics. You do not need to leap to the end, just to know which step you are on.
Your analytics solution is on a journey, whether you realise you are on that journey or not. Mike Hobson, Codestone
What Microsoft Fabric actually changes
Here is what Fabric actually does, minus the jargon. It brings your data into one platform so it becomes a single source of the truth for both analytics and AI. Microsoft’s own documentation describes the storage layer underneath it, OneLake, as the single place for all your analytics data, with one copy used across every engine rather than copied from tool to tool. It handles mixed needs too, blending monthly figures such as customer satisfaction scores with real-time data measured to the second. The payoff is trusted metrics that everyone reads the same way, which makes decisions consistent and, finally, makes AI usable, because AI is only ever as good as the data underneath it.
The newer capabilities are worth knowing about, though some are still rolling out:
- Data agents, now generally available, let you ask questions of your data in plain English without building a new report.
- Planning, currently in preview, lets you compare plan against actuals and run basic predictive models.
- An operations agent, also in preview, can act across your data, including human-in-the-loop steps like raising a purchase order.
Microsoft Fabric serves as that single source of the truth, for driving both analytics and AI. With a well-adopted Fabric and Power BI estate, you actually have less reliance on reports. Mike Hobson, Codestone
What it looks like in practice
Two examples from the session make this concrete. In manufacturing and distribution, stock reordering that lives in one person’s head tends to miss run rate and lead times, opening a gap between demand and supply that eats margin. Join the data together, add predictive modelling, and you improve on-time delivery, protect margin against price swings, and run leaner stock without the risk of running out. In retail, promotions and loyalty data that nobody analyses properly mean you cannot tell a strong promotion from a weak one, so you leak margin and miss revenue. The upside is well documented: McKinsey finds that personalisation built on joined-up customer data most often lifts revenue by 10 to 15%. In both cases the insight was always there in the data, it just was not reachable.
We are moving away from a big, flashy Power BI dashboard that some people understand and some do not, to extracting the insights that actually help you make decisions. Simon Fenech, Codestone
Why this matters now, in 2026
Why now rather than next year? Two reasons. The first is volatility. Markets can move faster than a monthly reporting cycle, and the cost of finding out late, after a price swing or a supply shock, lands straight on margin. How quickly you need to see it is your call, but you cannot make the call without the information in front of you. The second is deal readiness. When a business is preparing to divest, sell or acquire, private equity wants clean data to make clear decisions, so reporting integrity has become part of sale preparation, and we are seeing it drive client outcomes more than ever.
Copper pricing changing daily or hourly, the Straits of Hormuz. It is up to you how quickly you need to see that information. You cannot make decisions quickly without having the information there, and we are seeing that in 2026 more than ever. Simon Fenech, Codestone
Where to start
None of this happens overnight. Getting the foundation right is a programme of work rather than a switch you flip, so the sensible first move is simply to find out where you stand, and you do not need to commit to a full programme to do that. A free assessment is a straightforward call with one of Mike’s team to work out where you are on the journey, how you are licensed, the outcomes you want, and the challenges you face, whether that is divestment, private equity readiness or stock control. From there, you decide what is worth doing. The businesses getting real value from their data in 2026 are not the ones with the most dashboards. They are the ones who got the foundations right.
A free assessment is a call with one of Mike’s team to understand where you are in that journey, what outcomes you are trying to achieve, and how this kind of platform would help you make those decisions. Simon Fenech, Codestone
Book your free analytics assessment to find out where you stand on the journey. Prefer to watch first? See the full Beyond Power BI webinar on demand.
