How to Get Started with Copilot in Power BI

What Power BI Copilot Actually Does

Copilot in Power BI is a set of AI-powered chat experiences built into Microsoft's business intelligence platform. It lets you ask questions about data in plain English, request summaries of reports, generate new visualizations, and even write DAX formulas without knowing the syntax. As of April 2026, it is generally available in the report pane experience, with standalone and app-scoped versions in preview.

The three main ways to access Copilot are: the Copilot pane on the right side of any open report, the standalone full-screen Copilot accessible from Power BI's left navigation, and the app-scoped Copilot embedded within a published Power BI app. Each serves a different use case. The report pane answers questions about the specific report you have open. The standalone experience searches across all reports and semantic models you have access to. The app-scoped version works within the curated content of a single app.

Requirements Before You Start

Copilot is not available on free Power BI licenses or trial SKUs. Your organization must have one of the following:

• A paid Microsoft Fabric capacity at the F2 tier or higher
• A Power BI Premium capacity at the P1 tier or higher

A Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license alone does not unlock Copilot. The AI capabilities require organizational capacity, not just individual licensing.

Your Fabric capacity must also be in a supported region. Sovereign clouds are not supported due to GPU availability constraints. If your tenant is outside the United States or France, your Fabric admin needs to enable the setting that allows data to be processed outside your tenant's geographic region.

Administrators control the feature through the Fabric admin portal. Copilot is enabled by default at the tenant level, but your admin may have turned it off. If you cannot see the Copilot pane in a report, the first step is to check with your admin that the setting called "Users can use Copilot and other features powered by Azure OpenAI" is turned on.

How to Check Your License and Capacity

Before testing Copilot, confirm you are publishing reports to a workspace backed by qualified capacity. In the Power BI service, open a workspace, click the workspace settings gear icon, and look under the Premium tab. The capacity assignment is listed there. If the workspace is on shared capacity, Copilot will not function even if your individual license is active.

For the standalone Copilot experience, your organization needs either a dedicated Fabric Copilot capacity (FCC) or at least one workspace linked to an F2 or higher capacity. The service automatically selects an eligible workspace when you open standalone Copilot.

Using the Copilot Pane in a Report

Open any report published to a Premium or Fabric workspace. The Copilot icon appears in the report toolbar, typically in the upper right area. Click it to open the chat pane.

From the pane, you can:

Summarize the report. Type "Summarize this report" and Copilot scans all visible visuals and returns a narrative summary of the key trends and figures. This is useful when you receive a report from a colleague and need to get up to speed quickly.

Ask specific questions. Type a plain-English question like "Which region had the highest sales last quarter?" Copilot queries the underlying semantic model and returns an answer with a citation pointing to the specific visual it drew from.

Generate a new report page. If you have edit access to the report, describe the page you want: "Create a page showing monthly revenue by product category with a YoY comparison." Copilot builds the page and adds it to the report. You can keep it, modify it, or delete it.

Write DAX measures. In the semantic model view, Copilot can write and explain DAX expressions from plain language. Describe the calculation you need and Copilot generates the formula with an explanation of each component.

Prompts support up to 10,000 characters, which is enough to include detailed context, business rules, or multi-step instructions in a single message.

Getting Better Results from Copilot

Copilot performs better when the underlying semantic model has been prepared for AI use. Model owners can add descriptions to measures, tables, and columns through the semantic model properties panel. These descriptions give Copilot the business context it needs to interpret questions correctly. Without them, Copilot works from column names alone, which can lead to generic or inaccurate responses when field names are abbreviated or technical.

A few practical habits that improve output quality:

Clear chat when switching topics. The Copilot pane carries conversation context across your session. If you have been asking about revenue and switch to asking about headcount, click the clear chat button first. Mixing unrelated context degrades response accuracy.

Be specific in your questions. "Show me sales" produces a generic response. "Show me total net sales by region for Q1 2026, excluding returns" gives Copilot enough constraint to return something useful.

Include the time period. Copilot does not always know what "last quarter" means without date context in the model. If your semantic model has a date table with relative date filters, Copilot can use them. If not, state the dates explicitly.

Use the narrative visual for reports you share. The Narrative visual now defaults to Copilot mode for licensed users as of April 2026, meaning it auto-generates a text summary of your report data. You can embed this visual directly in reports sent to stakeholders, giving recipients an AI-written plain-English interpretation alongside the charts.

What Changed in April 2026

The April 2026 Power BI update brought two Copilot improvements worth noting. First, the mobile experience now supports full back-and-forth conversational chat, not just summaries. Users on Power BI Mobile for iOS can dictate questions using voice input, receive AI-generated visualizations, and see citations linking each response back to a source visual. Second, the Narrative visual character limit increased to 10,000 characters, allowing for longer, more detailed narrative prompts when you need Copilot to produce extended written commentary on complex datasets.

Standalone Copilot: Cross-Report Analysis

The standalone Copilot, currently in preview, is accessible from the left navigation bar in the Power BI service. Unlike the report pane, it searches across all reports, semantic models, and Fabric data agents you have permission to view.

This is useful for cross-dataset questions. If you want to ask "What was our customer acquisition cost last month compared to the prior three months?" and the relevant data lives in two different reports, the standalone experience can pull from both sources and synthesize an answer.

To enable it, your admin must turn on the tenant setting for the standalone experience, in addition to the base Copilot setting. Workspace autoselection handles billing routing automatically.

When Copilot Is Not the Right Tool

Copilot works best for conversational exploration, summarization, and report generation from existing semantic models. It is not a replacement for structured analysis on raw or poorly structured data. If your data lives in spreadsheets without a defined schema, or if your semantic model has no descriptions and uses abbreviated column names, Copilot output will be unreliable. In those cases, the prep work on the model is the prerequisite.

For teams that work with files uploaded directly rather than maintained semantic models, tools like VSLZ AI can run end-to-end analysis from a CSV or database connection without requiring a pre-built model, which reduces the setup overhead for ad-hoc work.

Next Steps

If you have confirmed your Fabric or Premium capacity and want to start, the practical path is: open a report on a supported workspace, enable the Copilot pane, ask for a summary first to confirm it is working, then experiment with specific data questions. If you have edit access, try generating a new report page from a plain-English description to see how close the output is to what you need.

Model preparation is the highest-leverage investment for teams that want reliable Copilot responses at scale. Adding descriptions to key measures and tables takes a few hours and significantly improves response quality for every user querying those models.