The Hidden Cost of “Simple” Search Apps
Many teams we talk to already use Azure AI Search. It’s a powerful service for making text and documents searchable with semantic and vector search.
But here’s the pattern we see over and over:
- A new web app is built (maybe Streamlit, maybe a custom React app).
- It’s hosted on Azure App Service or VMs.
- It duplicates authentication, hosting, monitoring, DevOps pipelines…
- And at the end of the day, users just get a search box + results table.
The business value is real, but the delivery is complex and costly for what it achieves.
Imagine if your users could
- Type a search query,
- Get semantic results with highlights and summaries,
- And see them right inside the Power BI dashboards they already use every day.
No new app.
No separate portal.
No extra infra to maintain.
Just a familiar search box in Power BI, powered by Azure AI Search + AI summarization.
Also note that this approach requires no PowerApps or Power Automate — it runs entirely within Power BI.
What does it include
Power BI report provides:
- Free text input for users to type search queries.
- Native Power BI filtering (date, region, product, etc.) alongside semantic search results.
- Paging support to navigate through large result sets.
- Export options to Excel, CSV, PDF, and more.
- Multiple report pages to query across different indexes, documents or datasets.
- Power BI native authentication to the report
High-Impact Use Cases
Organizations like yours can quickly benefit from this approach for scenarios such as
- Customer Service: Mine complaint text for themes (refunds, delivery delays, product defects).
- Compliance & Legal: surface contract clauses or policy excerpts directly in dashboards.
- Ops & IT: search across incident logs and root cause notes.
- HR & Internal Comms: make policies instantly discoverable by employees.
All without building another app that IT must support.
Why it matters?
- Cost savings: no Azure App Service, no custom UI hosting, no redundant auth.
- User adoption: everyone already knows Power BI. No training needed.
- Speed: what used to take weeks of app dev can now be delivered in days.
Where This Approach Fits Best
This design is intentionally simple and focused. It excels when you need:
- A single query to retrieve relevant results.
- Clear insights (summaries, highlights, tags) displayed directly in Power BI.
- Seamless integration with existing dashboards and metrics.
It’s built for search + analytics, not for chatbot-style experiences.
So, if your scenario requires things like:
- Conversational Q&A with follow-up questions,
- Multi-turn history or context retention,
- Uploading and reasoning over new documents during query,
Those are better served by a different architecture.
Think of this as “one search → one set of insights → shown in Power BI” — fast, clean, and highly effective for dashboards.
Your Next Step Toward Smarter Search
The exciting part here isn’t that it’s impossible tech or solution — it’s that the approach is far simpler than many expect, and that simplicity makes it faster, cheaper, and easier to adopt.
If you’re juggling multiple initiatives, this approach is lightweight and ideal for proving value before scaling further. You don’t need to build a full-blown application — instead, you can get something off the ground in days, not weeks. The sooner you see it running on your own data, the faster you’ll recognize its value.
Bring us your use case, and we’ll show you results fast (POC/implementation). You can skip the app dev overhead and light it up search inside Power BI directly. You’ll be surprised how simple (and cost-effective) it can be.
