How to prepare data for the Key Influencers visual

AI visuals in Power BI are powerful tools for uncovering hidden patterns — but they depend on having the right data. Power BI’s Key Influencers visual uses machine learning to determine which attributes are most important for a selected outcome.

Unlike traditional visuals such as bar charts or line graphs, where the relationship between data and display is obvious, data for AI visuals require more care and attention. The machine learning model powering Key Influencers can only generate useful insights if your data is clean, well-organized, and rich enough to find patterns.

Let’s look at how to prepare your data — and what to do if the “No influencers found” message appears.

What is the Analyze field in Power BI key influencers?

The “Analyze” field (also known as the Metric) is the target outcome you're investigating. This could be:

• A categorical field (e.g., Green, Amber, Red)
• A binary outcome (True/False)
• A numeric field (e.g., satisfaction scores)

Best practice: Use a field with low cardinality, that is few unique values. This helps the model detect meaningful patterns more reliably.

If your field is continuous like revenue or age, create binned categories. For example, instead of raw scores, use “High”, “Medium”, and “Low” categories.

Also, ensure each row in your dataset represents a unique observation — no duplicates for the same individual, customer, or case.

Choosing Key Influencers “Explain By” fields

The “Explain by” section contains the fields that will be evaluated to understand what might be influencing the thing you want to analyse.

Tips for choosing “explain by” fields:

• Include as many attributes as you have relevant (and clean) data for
• Avoid columns with many nulls or blanks
• Use correct data types (text, numeric, categorical)
• Look for attributes that have sufficient data. More rows give better performance with AI visuals. Aim for at least 100 observations per category — this gives the AI model enough depth to detect reliable patterns.

What to do when Power BI says “No Influencers Found”

Seeing the “No influencers found” error usually means the model couldn't find any statistically significant relationships between your Analyze field and the explain-by variables.

Here’s how to troubleshoot it:

1. Is your data distribution too even?

If your analyze field is too evenly distributed (e.g., 50% Yes / 50% No), there may not be enough variation for the model to detect influence.

2. Clean your data

Missing values reduce the model's ability to draw accurate conclusions. Clean up your data by intelligently filling in blanks or remove incomplete rows.

3. High cardinality in the metric column

If the Analyze field has too many unique values (e.g., raw revenue numbers), you could get the "No Influencers Found" error. Bin or group your metric into logical categories (like “Above Average” / “Below Average”).

Improve AI accuracy with data breadth and depth

When working with AI visuals like Key Influencers, think about both:

• Breadth: the number of attributes (columns) you provide
• Depth: the number of observations (rows)

A wide, clean, and deep dataset gives the machine learning model room to detect complex patterns and relationships — leading to more meaningful and actionable insights.

And if you would like to talk to us about getting your data AI-ready, then get in touch. We love a good data problem!