Smart Narrative is an AI-powered visual in Power BI that automatically generates natural language summaries for report visuals and report pages. It helps users quickly understand trends, patterns, and key insights without manually writing descriptive text.
The generated narrative can be customized by editing the text, inserting dynamic values, and formatting numbers. Since Smart Narrative is dynamic, the summary automatically updates whenever report filters, slicers, or cross-highlighting change the data.
Here for Stacked Area chart visual I created a smart narrative.
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How to Proceed?
Right-click a supported visual and select Summarize to generate a Smart Narrative for that visual. Alternatively, you can insert a Smart Narrative visual from the Visualizations pane to summarize the entire report page.
Step 2 Editing Smart Narrative
The smart narrative is now created. It can be customized based on the requirements.
We can add dynamic values or own values to the summary. Select the Smart Narrative visual and click the + (Insert value) button to insert dynamic values into the narrative.
We can use natural language to create a dynamic value that is automatically added to the Smart Narrative. Power BI interprets the request and generates the required calculation without the need to write DAX. The dynamic value updates automatically whenever the report filters, slicers, or data change. We can also assign a meaningful name to the value so that it can be easily referenced within the Smart Narrative whenever required.
We can also customize the value by showing values in currency, decimal number etc. We also have the flexibility to choose separator for thousands.
The Smart Narrative visual is dynamic. When users interact with slicers, filters, or cross-highlight other visuals in the report, the generated narrative and any inserted dynamic values are automatically updated to reflect the current report context.
You can review and manage the dynamic values used in the narrative by selecting the Review tab. This tab displays all the dynamic values that have been added to the Smart Narrative, allowing you to edit or remove them as needed.
Turn Auto-generated values On to display the AI-generated insights along with your custom narrative. You can also turn it Off if you want to show only the customized text and dynamic values.
Sometimes we may see some hidden summary symbol in smart narrative which means there is current data and filters doesn’t produce any result for the value.
Add smart narrative icon to the visual
Select the visual and open the Format pane.
Expand General → Header icons → Icons and turn Smart narrative On.
A Smart Narrative icon will now appear in the visual header, allowing report users to generate an on-demand summary of that visual. This feature is especially useful for accessibility and quick data explanations.
Click the More options (⋯) button in the upper-right corner of the visual. You can now see the Smart Narrative icon added to the visual header. Click the Smart Narrative icon to quickly generate a summary of the visual. We cannot create summaries for all types of visual.
Smart Narrative for an Entire Report Page
Besides summarizing individual visuals, Power BI also allows you to insert a Smart Narrative visual from the Visualizations pane. This automatically analyzes all supported visuals on the current report page and generates an overall summary highlighting trends, growth, outliers, and key business insights. The generated text can be edited and customized just like a visual-level narrative.
When to use Smart Narrative visual?
When you want to generate human like narratives to write a summary about created visuals very quickly, we can go for smart narrative.
Pros
• Automatically generates AI-powered summaries.
• Saves report development time.
• Updates dynamically with slicers and filters.
• Supports inserting dynamic values.
• Helps improve report accessibility.
• Easy for business users to understand insights.
Cons
• Not supported for every visual type.
• Limited control over automatically generated insights.
• Some data sources and connection modes are not supported.
• Cannot be pinned to dashboards.
• Publish to Web and Power BI Report Server do not support Smart Narrative.
Conclusion
Smart Narrative is a valuable AI-powered feature in Power BI that simplifies data storytelling by automatically generating easy-to-understand summaries for visuals and report pages. It helps report authors communicate insights faster while allowing customization through dynamic values and editable text. Although it has some limitations and doesn't support every visual type, Smart Narrative remains an effective tool for improving report readability and helping users quickly understand key business insights. As Power BI continues to expand its AI capabilities alongside Copilot and Microsoft Fabric, Smart Narrative remains an important feature for building more interactive and informative reports.
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