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Power BI with artificial intelligence: When should you use Copilot?
Copilot in Power BI lets you ask questions about data and create report pages. Check the requirements, compare its features with AI visuals, and test its answers against validated data.
Key takeaways
- Copilot and AI visuals are different options: Copilot accepts natural-language prompts. AI visuals support specific types of analysis within a report.
- Check four requirements before you start: supported capacity, permissions and settings, region, and language for the feature you want to use.
- Pro or Premium Per User alone isn't enough: Copilot also needs supported organizational capacity.
- A useful test compares answers with validated results: include filters, dates, and measures before deciding whether Copilot works for your team.
What can you do with AI in Power BI?
Microsoft's AI sample report shows visuals for different types of analysis. Copilot is a separate feature that can create and edit report pages from natural-language prompts.
| Option | What it's for | When to consider it |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot | Ask questions and get help creating report pages. | When the team needs to explore different questions. |
| Key influencers | Explore factors associated with an outcome. | When you want to understand which variables relate to a metric. |
| Decomposition tree | Break down a measure by dimensions. | When you need to explore a result by region, product, or another category. |
| Anomaly detection | Identify unusual values in a series. | When you want to investigate unusual changes over time. |
| Conventional report | Show predefined metrics and filters. | When the questions and measures are already agreed on. |
Each feature has its own requirements and limits. Start with the business question, then choose the feature that can answer it.
What do you need to enable Copilot in Power BI?
Before requesting a trial, confirm your capacity with your Power BI or Fabric administrator. Having another Microsoft Copilot license doesn't mean this feature is enabled.
According to Microsoft's documentation, you need supported organizational capacity: paid Fabric F2 or higher, or Power BI Premium P1 or higher. A Pro or Premium Per User license alone doesn't meet that requirement. You also need to check your settings and region.
An organization can use Fabric Copilot capacity assigned to a user to centralize consumption. This option allows Copilot use with Pro or Premium Per User workspaces, provided supported capacity is available.
Ask your administrator to check whether Copilot is enabled for the intended users. Also confirm access to the workspace and semantic model. The model defines the measures, relationships, and names used in the analysis.
Check the region and language requirements for the specific feature. Check both the service and Desktop if you plan to use both. For its documented data question experience, Microsoft supports questions in English. That doesn't mean every Copilot feature has the same requirement.
In that experience, answers in the Copilot pane don't automatically apply the page's filters or slicers. It also can't answer questions that require forecasting, anomaly detection, or identifying key influencers. For those analyses, check the available visuals and validate their results.
How can you test Copilot with your company's data?
Run the test in an appropriate workspace with people who know the metrics. Define what you'll consider a correct answer beforehand.
- Choose business questions. Select questions the team actually needs to answer. For accounts receivable, you might ask for overdue balances by customer and the change from the previous period.
- Prepare the expected answers. For each question, record the measure, grouping, period, and filters. Microsoft's evaluation guide recommends comparing the answer with a validated result.
- Run an illustrative case. This example isn't based on a client. An analyst asks for overdue accounts receivable by customer as of a specified date. The system queries the semantic model and returns a breakdown.
- Compare and record errors. The analyst compares the breakdown with a validated accounts receivable report. They check whether the balance, customers, and cutoff date match. If they don't, the analyst records the question and the difference before correcting or repeating the test.
- Decide based on the results. Measure how many answers match the expected result and note which ones need correction. Compare the review time with the time needed to use the existing report. Repeat the evaluation after adjusting the model.
Which option fits your analysis, and how much work does it take?
The decision depends on the questions, the quality of the model, and the work that follows the analysis.
Use Power BI's existing features when a report or its visuals can answer your questions. If the team needs to explore different questions, consider Copilot after confirming the requirements and testing its answers.
An automation platform can help if the process continues outside the report. For example, it can send an accounts receivable alert based on defined rules. Before choosing one, check how it will access the data and who will receive each alert.
Custom development can make sense when you need to integrate systems or build an experience existing tools don't provide. It requires defined permissions, maintenance, and evaluation. You don't need custom development just to check a metric already shown in Power BI.
Cost and timing depend on your contracted capacity, the model's condition, integrations, and the scope of the test. Copilot requests consume Fabric capacity based on the tokens processed. Microsoft recommends monitoring that consumption with Fabric Capacity Metrics.
To check data exposure, test with the actual permissions of the people who'll use the system. Microsoft warns that verified answers in preview shouldn't be used as a row- or object-level security mechanism.
To compare this decision with other Microsoft tools, read our guide to Copilot for business. To design your evaluation, you can also read about how we measure whether an assistant answers correctly.
What we do
Frequently asked questions
Does a Microsoft Copilot license enable Copilot in Power BI?
Not necessarily. Copilot in Power BI has its own capacity and configuration requirements. Ask your administrator to confirm the available capacity, whether it's enabled for your group, and your workspace access. If you don't meet the requirements yet, you can still use conventional reports or explore the available AI visuals.
Can Copilot create and edit Power BI reports?
Yes. It can help create and edit report pages from natural-language prompts. That doesn't guarantee the result will answer the business question correctly. Someone should review the measures, filters, and visuals before sharing the report or using it to make a decision.
Can you limit Copilot use to certain teams or people?
Your organization should review the available admin settings for enabling Copilot and controlling user access. It also needs to define permissions for workspaces and semantic models. Before rollout, test the experience with the intended users and confirm which data each person can query.
What if the semantic model isn't ready for Copilot?
Fix the model before expanding the test. Review measures, names, and relationships with your data team, and compare results with a validated report. Then run the same questions again. Additional prompts won't replace fixing an incorrect relationship or aggregation.
Written by
Quarl engineering team
We are an AI engineering team in Medellín. We build and run systems that reach production — automations, assistants and agents — and for three years we ran an assistant for two million users across ten countries.
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