Power BI and the Metascience of Management: Cognitive Prosthesis, Digital Labour, and the Automation of Epistemic Authority

This essay redefines Microsoft Power BI as not merely a business intelligence tool, but as a cognitive prosthesis and an epistemic infrastructure that influences management cognition, attention, and the generation of organisational knowledge. Although traditional literature regards Power BI mainly as a visualisation or decision-support instrument, this study employs a critical conceptual and metascientific perspective to analyse how the platform pre-defines legitimate evidence, influences organisational reasoning, and reallocates interpretive labour within knowledge-driven organisations. The analysis puts up three connected arguments. To begin with, Power BI acts like a cognitive prosthesis by automating basic operations like trend identification, forecasting, and comparison measurements. This frees managers from low-level duties while also making them dependent on its dashboards and algorithmic logic. Second, it works as a micro-technology of cognitive capitalism by capturing, directing, and turning management attention into a resource of economic and organisational value. Third, the platform incorporates epistemic authority into its visualisations and metrics, gently regulating the generation of organisational knowledge and influencing the ethical and political aspects of managerial decision-making. By integrating perspectives from cognitive science, critical theory, science and technology studies, philosophy of technology, and political economy, the article illustrates that the automation of cognition is inherently biased, resulting in epistemic constriction, ethical challenges, and technocratic validation masquerading as “data-driven” objectivity. The research enhances metascientific discourse by elucidating the infrastructure of knowledge production within organisations and advocating for reflexive literacy in the utilisation of data analytics platforms. It emphasises the ethical, epistemological, and organisational implications of cognitive prostheses such as Power BI and promotes a more critical approach to the technologies that increasingly shape managerial cognition and decisionmaking.