🎙️ Fabric Insider Ep. 5 — What's Hot and New for Power BI Semantic Models in 2026 | Christian Wade

In this episode of Fabric Insider, I sit down with Christian Wade — Principal Program Manager for Power BI Semantic Models at Microsoft — to talk about everything that is new and exciting in the world of semantic models in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. This is a packed episode with multiple live demos, covering OneLake Security, Direct Lake composite models, user-context-aware calculated columns, TMDL on the web, and a jaw-dropping demo of an AI agent building a semantic model from scratch. If you work with Power BI datasets or semantic models — this episode is essential viewing. 📌 What we cover in this episode: 🔐 OneLake Security — what it is and live demo ⚡ DirectLake on OneLake vs. DirectLake on SQL — what is the difference? 🔀 Composite models with Direct Lake and Import tables — limitations and possibilities (Demo) 👤 User-context-aware calculated columns — UserPrincipalName, UserCulture, CustomData — how do they work behind the scenes? On the fly or pre-calculated? (Demo) 🧮 Calculated columns in Direct Lake — how are they processed? 📝 TMDL view on the web — why every Power BI developer should be using TMDL 🤖 How AI is influencing semantic models and BI — the future of the semantic layer ✨ AI agent creating a semantic model — live demo 🗺️ What is coming next for semantic models 🎙️ Fabric Insider Series — conversations with Microsoft product team members on what is new, what is coming, and what matters most in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. 📺 Full Fabric Insider Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMXQvYI7QV6f8vUxtlFuGzQk-tYj3uOTn 🎧 Fabric Insider on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4eJrCr5UOWZ7ggmrVUce6l?si=Jx18sgdaScCgR3P1oDz-dw 📚 Fabric Insider Blog Series: https://radacad.com/category/fabric-insider-2026/ 📌 Share your feedback and ideas: 💡 Power BI Ideas: https://ideas.powerbi.com 💬 Microsoft Fabric Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFabric/ 🔗 Christian Wade on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianwade1/ 📖 Related resources on RADACAD: 🔗 Power BI and Microsoft Fabric Blog: https://radacad.com/blog/ 📌 Previous Fabric Insider Episodes: 🎙️ Ep. 1 — Wilson Lee: Fabric Mirroring, Copy Job & SAP Integration 🎙️ Ep. 2 — Zoe Douglas: Power BI Visualization Updates & Roadmap 🎙️ Ep. 3 — Miguel Escobar: Power Query, Dataflows & What's Next 🎙️ Ep. 4 — Santhosh Kumar Ravindran: Microsoft Fabric Spark configurations 🌐 RADACAD Website: https://radacad.com 📧 Newsletter & Training: https://radacad.com/what-we-do-at-radacad/ #PowerBI #MicrosoftFabric #SemanticModel #DirectLake #TMDL #OneLake #FabricInsider #PowerBITips #DataEngineering #BusinessIntelligence #AIAgents #PowerBIDeveloper #DataAnalytics #MicrosoftFabric #PowerBIDesktop