Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-08-11
Turn a Power BI report full of numbers into three insights an executive will actually act on
Reads a description of your Power BI report's visuals and numbers and produces a short, ranked insight narrative — what actually matters, what's noise, and what decision each insight should trigger.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
You are a senior data analyst preparing the narrative that goes on top of a Power BI report before it reaches an executive audience. The report itself has the numbers; your job is to say what matters and why, in a way that survives someone skimming it in 90 seconds. REPORT CONTENTS Monthly revenue trend (up 4% MoM), churn rate by segment (SMB churn spiked to 9% this month vs 5% average), NPS trend (flat), regional sales map (unchanged distribution). AUDIENCE VP of Customer Success and the exec staff meeting, who care about retention and are not deep in the underlying data themselves. BUSINESS CONTEXT We raised SMB pricing 15% at the start of this month; support ticket volume has not notably changed. WHAT DECISION THIS MIGHT INFORM Whether to roll back or phase in the SMB pricing change before it hits the enterprise segment next quarter. Do the following: 1. From everything in the report contents, select only the moves that are both statistically meaningful (not just noise in a volatile metric) and business-relevant to the decision context — most numbers in a report are neither, and shouldn't make the cut. 2. Rank your selected insights by how much they should change what the audience does next, not by how dramatic the percentage change looks — a 3% move in the metric that actually drives the decision outranks a 40% move in a metric nobody's about to act on. 3. For each insight, state it as: what happened, the most likely explanation given the business context (flagged clearly as a hypothesis if you don't have enough context to be sure), and the specific action or question it should prompt. 4. Explicitly call out anything in the report that looks alarming at a glance but is probably not worth executive attention, and say why — this protects the audience from chasing noise. WHAT NOT TO DO Do not summarize every visual in the report — an insight narrative that mentions everything is equivalent to mentioning nothing. Do not state a causal explanation as fact when the business context doesn't actually support it; flag it as your best hypothesis and say what would confirm it. OUTPUT FORMAT 1. Top 3 insights, ranked, each as: what happened / likely explanation (hypothesis-flagged if uncertain) / recommended action or question 2. "Looks alarming but probably isn't" section, one to two items, with the reason 3. One sentence: the single thing this audience should remember if they read nothing else
Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Ranking insights by decision impact rather than by magnitude of change directly counters the most common failure mode of AI-generated report summaries: without this instruction, a model defaults to surfacing whatever number moved the most in percentage terms, because that's the most salient signal in the raw data, even when a small move in the metric that actually matters to the decision at hand is far more important — this is exactly the kind of judgment call that requires the decision context to be given explicitly, since the model has no way to know which metric the room actually cares about otherwise. Requiring hypotheses about causation to be explicitly flagged as hypotheses, with a note on what would confirm them, prevents the single most damaging thing an AI-written executive summary can do: stating a plausible-sounding causal story (the SMB churn spike was caused by the pricing change) as settled fact when the business context given doesn't actually establish that link, which can send a room into a decision based on a coincidence the model dressed up as an explanation. The "looks alarming but probably isn't" section exists because executive audiences skimming a dashboard tend to overreact to whatever visual looks most dramatic regardless of whether it's actually meaningful, and having the model proactively name and defuse a scary-looking-but-likely-noise metric does real work that a purely additive insight list can't do — it requires actively arguing against attention rather than just directing it. Capping this at three ranked insights plus one closing sentence is a deliberate constraint against the model's tendency to be comprehensive when asked to summarize a report, since a report that mentions every visual is functionally useless to an audience trying to act in 90 seconds.
What you get back
Insight 1: SMB churn spiked to 9% from a 5% average this month, most likely explanation is the 15% pricing increase that took effect the same month (hypothesis — confirm by checking whether churned accounts skew toward customers near the price-sensitivity threshold before the increase). Recommended action: pull a cohort of churned SMB accounts and check their prior spend tier before deciding on the enterprise rollout. Looks alarming but probably isn't: the regional sales map shows an unchanged distribution, which might look like stagnation but is actually consistent with normal seasonal flatness at this point in the quarter.
Verified against
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-11
Changelog
- 2026-08-11 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT GPT-5.1.
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