Ashley Warren
Advanced Analytics Senior Consultant at Advancing Analytics
Bath, United Kingdom
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Ash is a Senior Analytics Consultant at Advancing Analytics, a UK based data and AI consultancy. Ash focuses on analytics engineering and data visualisation, helping our enterprise customers get value out of their data
In the past, I've led data teams at small and large organisations, helping unlock the power of data through storytelling that's underpinned by strong foundations. I started out my data career as a Power BI report developer, though in the last couple of years I find myself splitting my time between building in Databricks & optimising Power BI.
Ash co-organises the Bristol Power BI & Fabric User Group and can regularly be found speaking at user groups, conferences and events, sharing what he's learnt back with the community
Area of Expertise
Topics
How to make your Power BI Semantic Models faster!
Tired of the dreaded "this report is slow" feedback? Sluggish reports and long refreshes are often symptoms of unoptimised models or hidden design flaws. In this session, I'll give you the practical toolkit to find and fix them
Join me for this demo-filled, intermediate-level session, where I will walk you through how to approach this scenario. We'll work through examples of poorly performing reports/models, identify the cause of the issue and discuss how they can be redesigned or optimised to help improve performance.
I'll show you how you can use tools like DAX Studio and Tabular Editor to identify and correct issues, leveraging keys features like Best Practice Analyser, VertiPAQ analyser & DAX Traces. We'll also dissect some of the most common causes of slow DAX queries & show you how to avoid them.
You’ll leave this session with the tools and skills to build faster, more efficient models and finally silence the "slow report" complaints.
Agentic Development in Power BI
Agentic development practices has arrived in the software engineer space. Claude Code has taken the world by storm, allowing people to develop new software at lightning speed. It is becoming increasingly clear, that developers that lean into these practices are increasing their productivity by multiples.
For years, trends in the software engineering world have slowly trickled down to the data world. Naturally, this begs the question, how can we as Power BI developers take that and apply these agentic development practices to speed up our Power BI development?
In this intermediate to advanced level talk I take you through a number of different options for how you can make your development faster using Agents and AI, that I have been using to help me build, test and ship faster than ever before. We'll talk through how to get started, what tools you can leverage and the problems you experience on a daily basis that they can help you solve. We'll also discuss the pain points of agentic development and I'll share my top tips on how you can avoid the many pitfalls that I have already fallen into.
The future of development is Agentic, and for Power BI developers that future is now!
Why It's Time to Take Databricks AI/BI Seriously
I'm a Power BI developer by trade, and for years I've refused to engage with other data visualization platforms. Every time I did, I just found it was lacking capabilities or had serious deficiencies compared to Power BI.
Then 2025 hit and Databricks invested heavily in improving their Analytics offerings: AI/BI, Metric views and Genie. Now, Databricks AI/BI is ready to be a legitimate challenger in the Data Visualisation space.
In this talk I will show you how you can use AI/BI, metric views and Genie to get the most out of your data. We will start from basics, building a metric view, using it to build a dashboard and then setting up a Genie space. I'll then walk you through my top tips on how you can get the most out of each of them. We'll talk about the types of work where AI/BI thrives and discuss where I see it going in its pursuit of being the next big data visualization platform.
AI/BI is here and it's ready to be taken seriously.
Becoming a Geni(e)us: How to get the most out of Databricks Genie Spaces
Databricks genie spaces are an excellent tool for helping your business engage with your data. Having the ability to chat with your data, enables business users to get insight faster and closer to the source. But how can we ensure that Genie is accurately answering our user's questions and what do we need to consider before we rollout it out to in our organisations?
In this talk, we'll look at the best practices for running and maintaining a Genie space. We'll setup a genie space and discuss what you need to do upfront to ensure that they work for your users. Then we'll walk through the ongoing monitoring and maintenance of a Genie space & what you can do when users aren't getting the responses they expect. Finally we'll touch on the wider governance aspects of operating genie spaces, including when you should and shouldn't consider Genie spaces for your use case
Are you ready to optimise your genie spaces?
CI/CD in PowerBI: For when just hitting publish isn't good enough
When you're first starting out with PowerBI and want to share content with other users, you probably just hit the publish button in PowerBI Desktop. If you are like me, eventually you start to think, surely there has to be a better way to do this?! Spoiler: There is and I'm here to help you explore it!
Join me in this session where we will discuss what CI/CD is and why you should care about it as a PowerBI developer, all through the lens of my personal journey with PowerBI.
We'll discuss the problems I encountered as a beginner developer. Then we'll explore the options built into PowerBI via a handful of demos, which I explored in the intermediate stage of my career. Then finally we'll touch on some of the more advanced techniques I use now via external tools like Tabular Editor, Azure DevOps & the Fabric APIs.
Together, we'll discover more mature & scalable ways for you to deploy PowerBI content to your end users. You'll unlock the power of effective multi-developer collaboration and begin to realise all the benefits that CI/CD best practices can make for a PowerBI development team.
Power BI Next Step Sessionize Event Upcoming
Databricks Data and AI Summit 2026 Upcoming
Why It's Time to Take AI/BI Seriously:
https://www.databricks.com/dataaisummit/session/why-its-time-take-aibi-seriously
Data Céilí 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Devon and Cornwall Microsoft Power BI User Group
How to make your Power BI Semantic Models faster!
Databricks Bristol Meetup
How to become an AI/BI Geni(e)us in 20 minutes (or less)
SQLBits 2026 Sessionize Event
Data Swindon
CI/CD in PowerBI: For when just hitting publish isn't good enough
Fabric & Power BI - Bristol User Group
10 tips that'll up your PowerBI game in 20 minutes
Fabric & Power BI Manchester User Group
CI/CD in PowerBI: For when just hitting publish isn't good enough
Birmingham Power BI Meetup #PBIBRUM
CI/CD in PowerBI: For when just hitting publish isn't good enough
Data Céilí 2025 Sessionize Event
Fabric & Power BI - Bristol User Group
CI/CD in PowerBI: For when just hitting publish isn't good enough
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