Thanks to everyone who joined our first-ever AMA on the transition from Power BI Premium to Microsoft Fabric! It was a lively, honest, and highly practical session packed with insight.
If you missed it, this post recaps the key themes, new capabilities, and advice we shared - all based on real-world questions from your peers.
Microsoft is retiring Power BI Premium (P SKUs) and transitioning customers to Microsoft Fabric (F SKUs). If your renewal is coming up, this isn’t just a licensing change - it's a platform shift. And it opens up an entirely new world of analytics capabilities.
What’s staying the same?
You still get all your Power BI capabilities: dashboards, reports, models.
Pro and Premium Per User licenses are currently unaffected.
What’s changing?
Fabric adds much more: data engineering, real-time analytics, data science, and AI.
Premium capacities (P SKUs) will expire and you’ll need to migrate to Fabric capacities.
If you’re currently using a Premium capacity, Microsoft has likely communicated your end date already. If not - now’s the time to check.
We talked a lot about what to think through before making the move:
Assess your current estate: usage, model design, refresh performance.
Understand how Fabric’s compute behaves: bursting, smoothing, throttling - all affect performance differently than Premium.
Start early: Microsoft offers a grace period for early adopters, so you can move without double billing.
Train your team: Fabric introduces Lakehouses, Pipelines, and a new admin model.
Govern your rollout: Don’t open the floodgates without a clear plan - especially for self-service users.
One of the most exciting parts of Fabric is what it opens up beyond Power BI:
Unified data storage with OneLake across all workloads
Data engineering capabilities with Spark and notebooks
Real-time analytics for streaming data
Built-in AI and ML tooling you can apply directly to your datasets
Integrated governance and cost control across services
This was the core theme of the session: “What’s new for me if I’m just using Power BI today?”
🚀 Direct Lake Mode – Combines the speed of import with the freshness of live data. No refreshes. No duplication.
🧠 Copilot & Gen BI – Use natural language to generate reports, write DAX, and ask questions. A faster way to get to insight.
🔗 Semantic Link – Let engineers and scientists reuse Power BI models directly in code — no more APIs or exports.
🧩 Model on Lakehouses/Warehouses – Build models natively on Fabric storage — skipping Power Query altogether.
🎯 Data Activator & Agents – Trigger actions, alerts, or workflows based on your semantic model. Automated, contextual decision-making.
📊 Richer Lineage & Deployment – Full lineage across data pipelines, models, and reports. Git-integrated deployment pipelines.
🧱 Unified Workspace – Analytics and engineering coexist. Reports, models, notebooks, and pipelines all in one place.
📈 Fabric Admin Insights – Deep monitoring of capacity, usage, and platform health — far beyond what Power BI alone offered.
We introduced a practical 4-step cycle:
Assess – Understand your current usage, performance, and architecture.
Plan – Prioritise workloads, identify blockers, and create a phased roadmap.
Execute – Migrate in waves, addressing technical and business dependencies.
Validate & Educate – Confirm everything’s working, and train users to get the most out of Fabric.
Pro tip: Don’t treat migration as a lift-and-shift. Fix what’s broken and optimise as you go.
Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring (FUAM): Free tool to monitor capacity and usage.
Custom tooling (like our Spect8 app): Track usage beyond 30 days, stitch together Power BI and Fabric insights.
Govern carefully: If you're not ready for citizen data engineering, you can switch off Fabric creation at the tenant level (but don't leave it off forever).
As mentioned during the AMA, we're offering a no-cost migration assessment (for eligible customers via Azure Innovate funding).
It includes:
A Data Landscape Workshop to understand your broader analytics needs
A Power BI capacity review to find inefficiencies and performance blockers
Model benchmarking against best practices
A migration plan tailored to your environment
Access to our Fabric Fundamentals course to upskill your team
If you're looking to move with confidence, or even just understand where you stand, this is a great place to start.
Don't panic - this isn't a scary migration if planned properly.
Start early to avoid disruption and access Fabric's broader potential.
Think beyond lift-and-shift - Fabric gives you the chance to fix and evolve.
Power BI gets better in Fabric - not replaced, but supercharged.
Got more questions? Reach out to the team, check out the recording for a deeper dive, or download the flyer of our assessment.
Thanks again to everyone who joined us! Keep an eye out for the next AMA!