Rishi Sapra

Rishi is a Chartered Accountant and Microsoft MVP (technology influencer/speaker) with an Executive MBA (Hons) and a first class degree from the London School of Economics. He currently leads Data & AI strategic projects at Avanade (Accenture-Microsoft JV), focusing on Microsoft Fabric solutions, governance frameworks, and enterprise migrations. With 20+ years experience at Big 4 firms, Technology consulting and leading financial institutions (Deloitte, KPMG, HSBC, Barclays, Accenture), he combines deep financial expertise with cutting-edge data and AI capabilities to drive business transformation. He runs an accelerator program - Power Platform Finance (www.powerplatformfinance.com) for finance professionals to learn Power BI through a combination of interactive e-learning and instructor-led training, in a combination that allows learners to be able to apply it effectively to their own data and processes.

Proposed Sessions for 2026

Data Storytelling in Power BI: From Reports to Narratives

Transform Power BI reports into compelling narratives. Learn storytelling structure, pre-attentive attributes, argumentative data presentation, and persona-based design. Includes real-world examples and frameworks for reports that drive action, not just present data.

From Excel to Fabric with AI Agents: Automating Migration with MCP Servers

Automate Excel-to-Fabric migrations using MCP servers and AI agents. Claude reads Excel formulas, generates Power Query/DAX, and validates outputs. Learn to compress weeks of reverse-engineering into hours while maintaining quality. Includes config templates.

From Manual Month-End to AI-Powered Finance: Building Self-Service Analytics in Fabric

Build production-grade financial reporting in Fabric with enterprise security, quality gates, and AI assistance. Learn medallion architecture for multi-entity data, MCP-accelerated development, and semantic models optimized for both traditional BI and AI agents.

From SAP Extracts to AI-Powered Insights with Business Process Solutions

Unlock SAP data with Business Process Solutions for Fabric. Live demo shows automated deployment of lakehouses and reports, AI-assisted customization via MCP servers, and conversational agents in Teams. Learn to compress weeks of development into days.

From Strategy to Execution: Building AI-Ready Data Products with Microsoft Fabric

Transform data strategy into production reality. Learn to structure Fabric workspaces and domains, build medallion architecture with automated quality gates, and prepare for AI with proper metadata. Includes templates for CoEs, data contracts, and DevOps patterns.

Taming the Firehose: Technical Acceleration and ADHD

Data/AI moves faster than anyone can follow. For data professionals with ADHD (suspected or diagnosed), this creates unique challenges and opportunities. Learn practical strategies for leveraging neurodivergent strengths while avoiding overwhelm, burnout, and scattered learning.

Previous Sessions

What does Microsoft Fabric mean for a Finance/Business Analyst?

For a business team such as Finance, Microsoft Fabric allows you to go from being “IT reliant” to “IT enabled” and this session shows you how! Whether you’re a data explorer, data analyst, data engineer – or perhaps a newly coined analytics engineer – we will explore what Microsoft Fabric means for you. We will look at the need for the data platform components in Fabric, applied for a finance data use case, and consider the benefits of this being in a SaaS lakehouse architecture. We will also consider how you need to organise your Finance and IT teams to work best with Fabric so that you have the right capabilities to deliver meaningful financial insights at scale.

How to learn fast-changing tech in a post pandemic, Attention-starved world

Struggling to figure out how to learn about new features and pick up new skills in a technology environment that is moving so fast? In this session, Rishi will highlight some key principles of instructional design and how you can use them to become a better learner or teacher!

Power BI Governance: 6 steps to success

Learn how to deploy Power BI at scale within a large Enterprise. The mantra behind this is “discipline at the core, flexibility at the edge” - we will cover deploying appropriate guardrails/controls whilst still retaining the notion of “self-service” within the organization.

Storytelling With Data

Learn how to present arguments with data to effectively communicate the insights you need to get across

Tips and Tricks for working with Finance Data in Power BI

<p>Excel has always been the tool of choice for the finance team with the flexibility it provides for logic, formatting and presentation of numbers. But this flexibility has also caused Governance nightmares, performance issues and huge risks with manual processes. Is it possible to also achieve the desired outcomes and flexibility with Power BI whilst also having all the benefits of working in a more controlled, automated and feature-rich environment? Yes! In this session Rishi will show how you can have your finance cake and eat it, showing how to build dynamically formatted financial statements , waterfall charts and KPIs in Power BI to tell an engaging story with finance data.

The Incidental Business Analyst (BA) – Designing a Finance Power BI Data Model to Tell a Story

Join this session to learn the key steps in designing a data model: Know Your Audience (KYA), Complete a Scoping Template, Define the data granularity/scope and design a conceptual model. We will use time-tested methodologies based on Kimball Data modelling techniques, including a Bus Matrix and Starnet, complete with templates available for you to freely download.