Getting Started with Copilot for Power BI

 

Copilot for Power BI is Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant built directly into the Power BI experience. Copilot for Power BI helps you create reports, ask questions about your data, generate summaries, and speed up report creation with natural language. It lets you interact with your data using plain English; no formulas, no drag-and-drop required. Whether you’re a business analyst who wants a quick summary of a sales report or a data professional who needs to generate DAX expressions faster, Copilot has something for you. It works in both Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service.

In this tutorial, we will show how to get started with Copilot in Power BI, including setup, examples, and best practices.

Note: Copilot is enabled by default in eligible environments, but admins can disable it. Some experiences (like standalone Copilot) are in preview. If you cannot find the Copilot button, check with your IT or admin team first.

Prerequisites and Requirements

Before using Copilot, ensure your environment meets these requirements:

• Capacity/Licensing:
  • A paid Fabric capacity (F2 or higher) or Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher)
  • Trial capacities, free SKUs, and Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) alone are not supported
  • You need admin, member, or contributor access to at least one supported workspace
• Admin Settings (tenant-level, requires Fabric admin privileges):
  • Enable “Users can use Copilot and other features powered by Azure OpenAI” in the Fabric admin portal
  • For standalone Copilot (preview): Enable the specific tenant setting for cross-item experiences
• Region and Availability:
  • Your Fabric capacity must be in a supported geographic region. If it isn’t, Copilot will not be available
  • Not supported in sovereign clouds
  • Some features (standalone Copilot, Copilot in apps) have additional regional restrictions (e.g. not in India West, Indonesia Central, etc.)

Changes to capacity or settings can take up to 24 hours to propagate.

1. Enable Copilot (Admin Task)

• Go to the Fabric admin portal (from Power BI: Settings > Admin portal)
• Navigate to Tenant settings
• Find and enable “Users can use Copilot and other features powered by Azure OpenAI”
• Specify who it applies to (e.g. the entire organization or specific security groups)
• Click Apply

If you’re not an admin, request this from your organization’s Fabric/Power BI administrator.

2.  Access Copilot in the Power BI Service

• Sign in to Power BI
• Open an existing report (or create a new one from a semantic model in a supported workspace)
• Look for the Copilot pane on the right side of the report canvas (generally available)
  • Type natural language questions like: “Summarize key insights” or “Show sales by region as a bar chart.”

Standalone Copilot (preview):

• Use the left navigation pane to open the full-screen Copilot experience
• It can search across reports, semantic models, or Fabric items and answer broader questions
• Ask questions across any report, semantic model, or Fabric item you have access to (not limited to the current report)
  • Search for specific reports or datasets across your organization
  • Ask questions about data from multiple sources in one conversation
  • Summarize entire reports or drill into a specific topic
  • Use a Fabric data agent for advanced, domain-specific answers

In Power BI Apps (preview): 

Copilot may appear in the app’s left navigation, scoped to the app’s content.

• Open a published app
• Copilot appears in the left navigation
• Questions are scoped to the curated content inside that app

Tip: If you don’t see Copilot, verify your workspace is assigned to a supported capacity and that tenant settings are enabled.

3. Use Copilot in Power BI Desktop

• Open Power BI Desktop
• Open or create a report
• Go to the Home tab >> select Copilot
• The Copilot pane appears automatically on the right
• Power BI asks you to choose a Copilot-compatible workspace
• Select a workspace associated with a supported Premium/Fabric capacity (only eligible workspaces appear)
• Use the inline Copilot pane for tasks like:
  • Creating a report page
  • Generating DAX measures
  • Describing measures
  • Other authoring assistance

You can switch workspaces later via File > Options > Copilot (preview) settings.

4. Try Basic Prompts and Features

Once you have access, experiment with these common uses:

Build Report Pages Automatically:

• Open a report (Copilot pane)
• Describe the report you want in plain English, and Copilot generates an initial set of visuals and a layout

"Create a sales performance page showing revenue by region, month-over-month trends, and top 10 products."

Copilot interprets this and produces a draft report page for you to refine. 

Create Summary Narratives: Copilot can add an intelligent narrative visual to your report — a text box that automatically describes key trends, anomalies, and highlights in the data. This updates dynamically as data changes, saving report authors from manually writing and maintaining commentary.

Generate DAX Queries: For more technical users, Copilot can write DAX (Data Analysis Expressions). DAX is the formula language used in Power BI semantic models. You describe the calculation you need in plain English (“What measures should I use to track profit margin?”), and Copilot generates the DAX. This does not replace understanding DAX, but it can dramatically speed up common patterns and help less experienced users get started with complex measures.

Auto-Describe Semantic Model Measures: Copilot can automatically generate human-readable descriptions for measures in a semantic model. These descriptions appear when business users hover over fields, making the model more self-documenting and reducing the classic “what does this metric mean?” question.

Prompt Tips:

• Be clear and specific
• Prompts can be up to 10,000 characters
• Use the Clear chat button when switching topics to reset context
• For best results, prepare your semantic model first (see related tutorials on Microsoft Learn)

5. Prepare Your Data for Copilot

This is one of the most important and frequently overlooked steps. Copilot is only as good as the data model it works with, and it performs much better when your semantic model is optimized for AI. Poorly prepared data leads to generic or inaccurate answers.

Key Preparation Steps:

• Use clear, business-friendly field and measure names. Avoid internal abbreviations or system-generated names like col_amt_2.
• Write descriptions for your measures and tables so Copilot understands what each field means in business terms.
• Go to the Home tab >> use the Prep data for AI button:
  • To set Verified Answers for key visuals (so Copilot returns exact visuals for common questions).
  • Add AI instructions and data schemas to give Copilot business context.
• Hide fields that are not useful for end-user analysis to reduce noise in Copilot’s responses.
• Use consistent date table conventions so Copilot can correctly interpret time-intelligence questions.
• Mark key fields appropriately to help Copilot prioritize the right information.
• In the Power BI service, mark the semantic model as Approved for Copilot (under model Settings).

Best Practices

• Start simple and iterate on prompts
• Monitor capacity usage (Copilot consumes Compute Units, which you can track via the Fabric Capacity Metrics app)
• Test in a non-production workspace first
• Review outputs carefully, as AI responses can vary (nondeterministic) and may include general knowledge if not grounded in your data

Limitations & Important Considerations

• Not supported: sovereign clouds, free/trial capacities, real-time streaming models, live connections to Analysis Services (for page creation), custom visuals, or heavy styling/formatting changes.
• Responses may vary slightly even with the same prompt (AI is nondeterministic).
• Repeated identical prompts on unchanged models may return cached results (within ~24 hours).
• Multilingual prompts are not officially supported (English works best).
• Data sent to Azure OpenAI may be processed outside your region (check your admin settings).
• Standalone Copilot is not yet available in some regions (e.g. India West, Qatar Central, etc.).
• Always verify critical insights with source data.

Conclusion

Getting started with Copilot for Power BI is less about learning a new formula language and more about setting up the right environment, using a clean semantic model, and asking clear questions. If your organization has the required capacity and admin settings, Copilot can help you move from blank canvas to a useful report draft much faster. With Copilot, a beginner can build a dynamic, professional business report. If Copilot isn’t appearing after setup, double-check capacity assignment, tenant settings, and region compatibility. Start with simple questions in an existing report to build confidence, then keep exploring the advanced features.