Chris Cusumano
Senior Data Engineer | Microsoft
St. Louis, Missouri, United States
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Since discovering Power BI in 2018, Chris Cusumano has focused on using data to simplify work, not complicate it. He’s helped teams across airline operations, engineering consulting, auto repair, and SaaS turn fragmented data into clear, usable insights through well-structured models, intuitive visuals, and practical analytics.
In 2026, he joined Microsoft as a Senior Data Engineer, leveraging Power BI, Fabric, and AI data agents to drive internal reporting.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Impact IQ: Scaling Power BI Successfully Begins with Visual-Level Lineage
Impact IQ has become a widely adopted, open-source solution designed to bring real impact analysis and governance to Power BI environments. Used by developers, BI teams, and tenant admins, it delivers automated backups, deep metadata extraction, and workspace transparency - without relying on paid tools.
Power BI makes it very easy to build - but much harder to safely scale. Impact IQ addresses the fundamental challenge of growing across environments without clear visual-level lineage or true impact visibility. By surfacing report, page, and visual dependencies, teams gain the confidence to evolve semantic models, refactor measures, and manage change without breaking production content.
In this session, we’ll walk through the different editions of Impact IQ - including Core, Local, Tenant Admin, and Semantic Link Labs - and explore the real-world use cases for each. You’ll see how organizations use Impact IQ to centralize metadata, understand cross-workspace dependencies, and create structure across Dev/Test/Prod environments.
Attendees will leave with practical strategies for scaling Power BI responsibly and implementing a community-driven approach to governance and impact intelligence in their own environments.
Breaking Bad….Governance in Power BI: Free & Open-Source Solution
As Power BI usage grows across your organization, even small changes — like renaming a field, moving a measure, or removing a column — can trigger a domino effect of broken visuals and failed refreshes. At scale, tracking down what broke (and why) can feel impossible.
This session shows how to take back control with a free, open-source toolkit that gives you full visibility across your workspaces — all the way down to the visual.
Built for everyone — no setup, no permissions, no hassle. Just one click, and you’re off!
You’ll see how it:
• Automatically backs up every report, model, and dataflow
• Maps dependencies across measures, visuals, and pages
• Shows exactly what will break before deploying changes
• Tracks refresh history and model health across all workspaces
• Delivers everything in an interactive Power BI dashboard
Walk away knowing how to see every connection, prevent breakages, and bring true transparency to your Power BI environment.
Power Query Secrets: Unlocking Low-Code Data Transformation
Power Query is where most Power BI solutions truly begin. While upstream transformations are always ideal, Power BI wouldn’t be what it is today without the flexibility and magic of Power Query.
In this session, we’ll focus on practical, real-world tips and patterns that help Power Query solutions in Power BI and Dataflows stay reliable as data evolves. You’ll learn ways to make queries easier to read, easier to troubleshoot, and far less likely to break when a data source changes unexpectedly.
We’ll also explore some more advanced Power Query ideas that will feel familiar to DAX and SQL users, offering a fresh perspective on how you approach and organize logic as your data needs grow.
Walk away feeling more comfortable and confident in Power Query, ready for whatever your data throws at you next.
The Cloud & AI Summit 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
The Fabric Cafe 2026 User group Sessionize Event
SQL Saturday St. Louis Sessionize Event
dev up 2025 Sessionize Event
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