What's New: Power BI (for Sales) (2025 release wave 1)

Overview

The video walks through the enhanced Power BI sales app in version 26.1, organized around four themes. The previous wave focused on sales orders and sales invoices. This wave moves earlier in the sales lifecycle to opportunities, quotes and return orders, and adds profitability views so users can see whether sales make money, not only how much is sold.

The presenter demos reports for opportunities, quotes, return orders, profitability by customer, item and salesperson, demographics with maps, and three AI-assisted reports. The AI-assisted reports use statistical data mining techniques rather than generative AI. The video ends with a pointer to the user documentation on Power BI KPIs, ad hoc analysis and Excel reports.

Key points

• Version 26.1 ships seven new reports in the Power BI sales app, plus updates to existing ones.
• The app now goes beyond the previous focus on sales orders and invoices. It covers opportunities (CRM) and sales quotes on one side, and return orders and credit memos (sales quality) on the other.
• Profitability views include a Pareto analysis by customer, a bubble chart by item and by salesperson, and item category sales over time to spot seasonality.
• Sales Demographics and Sales by Location use maps to show customer count, sales and profit by geography, item category and customer posting group.
• Sales Decomposition, Key Sales Influencers and Sales Segmentation provide AI-assisted analysis based on proven statistical data mining techniques, not generative AI.
• Key Sales Influencers shows likelihood multipliers, for example a 1.6 times higher likelihood of a sale when a given salesperson is involved.
• Documentation covers Power BI KPIs, ad hoc analysis with data analysis on lists and queries, and legacy and new Excel sales reports.

Features

Quotes

• 0:05 “in version 26.1 we come with an enhanced powerp app that makes the great app you have from last semester even better”
• 0:25 “we changed or we focused on four different topics or themes in the powerbi sales app in the version 2025 release way one”
• 1:26 “in the last wave the sales app was focusing on sales orders and sales invoices and in this wave we kind of move left”
• 4:48 “not only how much we sell and the amount we sell for but also is it actually making money”
• 12:23 “it can be generative AI what you’re going to see here is applications of like very like old and but Prov proven data mining”
• 13:00 “if i choose the next part here i can either simply choose my own analysis not ai assisted”
• 14:15 “that’s the sales decomposition AI assisted report”
• 14:36 “the next report is actually two different reports in one it’s called key sales influencers”
• 15:16 “whenever Jim Olive here is involed evolved you can see that there is a 1.6 times higher likelihood that you make a sale”
• 18:20 “we ship in version 26.1 as you can see we have seven new reports coming”
• 18:59 “all of this is documented in our documentation for users”

Presenters (as heard): Kenny.