In our previous review we looked at how 2025 turned agentic AI into a product. Now it is time to get into the detail: what each of the three platforms we work with —Qlik, Tableau and Power BI— did during the year. A practical summary, tool by tool.
Power BI and Microsoft Fabric
Power BI’s year was the year of Fabric and Copilot, with a licensing change that changed everything.
- Copilot goes mainstream. Over the course of 2025, Copilot became established in Power BI Desktop and in the service: DAX generation, creation of visualisations, narrative summaries and natural-language questions.
- The end of the F64 wall (30 April 2025). Microsoft removed the F64 capacity requirement. Copilot, Fabric data agents and AI features became available on any paid SKU of F2 or higher. Worth remembering: a Power BI Pro licence on its own is not enough, you need the organisation’s Fabric capacity.
- Fabric data agents. They reached general availability within Microsoft 365 Copilot, enabling governed natural-language queries over Fabric sources.
Tableau and Salesforce
Tableau reoriented its story around agentic analytics and its integration with the Salesforce ecosystem.
- Tableau Next. Introduced in April 2025 as an agentic analytics platform, with three agents on top of a semantic layer: Concierge (conversational questions with visualisations and recommendations), Data Pro (preparing and translating data into business language) and Inspector (proactive monitoring of data and anomalies).
- General availability. Concierge and Data Pro reached GA in June 2025; Inspector arrived later in the year.
- Reshaping of Tableau Pulse. As of 1 August 2025, “Pulse for Salesforce” was no longer sold to new customers; existing ones keep it, and much of that metric-tracking capability moved into Tableau Next.
Qlik
Qlik reinforced its commitment to a trustworthy data foundation and to AI, laying the groundwork for its agentic experience.
- Qlik Talend Cloud as a foundation of trusted data: data movement, transformation, streaming, governance and quality to feed analytics and AI.
- AI Trust Score (July 2025). A metric for assessing how ready your data is for AI, consistent with Qlik’s “trusted data first” philosophy.
- Preparing the agentic experience. The work of 2025 led, in February 2026, to the general availability of Qlik’s agentic experience in Qlik Cloud, with Qlik Answers at the forefront.
And all of them, leaders according to Gartner
To close, all three —Microsoft, Salesforce (Tableau) and Qlik— appear as leaders in Gartner’s 2026 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI platforms, a market the analyst evaluates precisely by its progress towards agentic AI and governed semantics.
Our read
There is no “best tool” in the abstract: the best is the one that fits your context, your data and your team. What the three do have in common in 2025 is the direction of travel: agents, natural language and a governed semantic layer as the foundation.
At Digital Fox Data we work with all three and help you choose and implement the one that best suits your business. If you want to modernise your BI in 2026, let’s talk.