PowerBI Robots Update: Service Principal Authentication and FTP Delivery

As Power BI automation matures inside enterprise environments, two requirements become increasingly clear: stronger authentication models and more flexible delivery options.

Automation is no longer just about scheduling reports. It’s about ensuring that reporting workflows are secure, auditable, scalable, and capable of integrating with a wide range of systems.

In this latest release, PowerBI Robots introduces two highly requested capabilities designed to meet those needs:

• Service Principal Authentication
• FTP delivery for automated playlists

Together, these updates extend PowerBI Robots’ ability to operate reliably in IT-managed, security-driven environments, without adding operational complexity.

Moving Beyond User-Based Authentication

Many automation setups still rely on user-based credentials to authenticate delivery channels such as email or SharePoint. While this approach can work in smaller setups, it often introduces challenges at scale:

• Credentials tied to individual users
• Increased risk when users change roles or leave the organization
• Limited traceability and governance
• Difficult alignment with security and compliance policies

Modern Azure-based architectures increasingly favor Service Principals (Azure AD App Registrations) as a best practice for automation. They provide a non-personal, centrally managed identity that can be governed, audited, and secured consistently across systems.

This release brings that model directly into PowerBI Robots.

Service Principal Authentication in PowerBI Robots

PowerBI Robots now supports Service Principal authentication for:

• Email providers
• SharePoint providers

This allows organizations to authenticate automation workflows using an Azure AD App Registration instead of personal user accounts.

What this enables

• Credential-free automation
  No dependency on individual user passwords.
• Centralized identity management
  Authentication is owned and managed by IT, not individual users.
• Improved governance and auditability
  Clear ownership, traceability, and alignment with security policies.
• Enterprise-ready automation
  Better support for long-running, business-critical reporting workflows.

For IT and security teams, this means greater control and reduced operational risk. For business teams, it means automation that just works, reliably and securely.

Extending Delivery Options with FTP

Enterprise reporting ecosystems are rarely limited to a single platform. While email, SharePoint, and Teams cover many use cases, some environments still rely on FTP-based ingestion for downstream processing, integrations, or legacy systems.

With this release, PowerBI Robots introduces FTP as a native delivery option for automated playlists.

What you can do with FTP delivery

• Automatically deliver report outputs to FTP servers
• Integrate Power BI reporting with external or legacy systems
• Support batch-based or scheduled ingestion workflows
• Extend automation beyond Microsoft-native destinations

This option allows PowerBI Robots to fit naturally into heterogeneous enterprise architectures, without forcing teams to redesign existing pipelines.

🎥 See FTP delivery in action
To understand how this works in practice, you can watch a short walkthrough showing how to configure and execute FTP delivery for playlists:

The video demonstrates the full flow, from selecting FTP as a delivery destination to executing the playlist and validating the output on the server.heir operational reality.

Why This Release Matters

As automation scales, so do expectations around security, governance, and flexibility.

This release makes PowerBI Robots even better suited for:

• Enterprise automation scenarios
• IT-managed reporting environments
• Policy-driven security models
• Complex delivery workflows

More control. More flexibility. Same automation simplicity.

What’s Next

PowerBI Robots continues to evolve based on real-world enterprise needs, with a strong focus on secure automation, operational resilience, and integration flexibility.

If you’re looking to modernize how Power BI reports are authenticated and delivered, this release is a solid step forward.

👉 Explore PowerBI Robots and discover how these new capabilities fit into your reporting automation strategy.