Power BI Copilot: Using AI to Build Reports That Actually Work

What Copilot in Power BI can do, what licensing it needs, and how to prepare your semantic model so the AI answers correctly, based on Microsoft Learn.

The sales team at a consumer goods distributor heard Power BI now has Copilot, so they opened an existing report and asked, "How are Northeast sales this quarter?" The AI gave a vague answer or picked the wrong column. Most of the time the problem is not the AI but the data underneath, which is not ready for AI to read. This article summarises what Copilot can do, what you need to prepare, and how to get value from it, based on the Overview of Copilot for Power BI documentation on Microsoft Learn.

What is Power BI Copilot?

Copilot in Power BI is an AI assistant that reads your semantic model (the tables, relationships and measures you have built) and helps both report authors and report readers. The key point: Copilot answers only as well as your semantic model is clear.

What Copilot can do

For report authors

• Create and edit report pages from plain-language instructions
• Summarise the semantic model
• Create a narrative visual, a text summary on the report
• Write DAX queries and add descriptions to measures

For report readers

• The Copilot pane on the right of a report summarises the report and answers questions about the data
• Copilot summaries can be included in report subscription emails
• A full-screen standalone Copilot experience and Copilot in apps, which the documentation marks as Preview

Conditions to know before you start

• Capacity: the documentation requires paid Fabric capacity F2 or higher, or Power BI Premium P1 or higher. A Pro or PPU licence alone is not enough, and trials are not supported.
• Admin settings: the tenant setting allowing Copilot must be turned on.
• Data region: for tenants outside the US and EU data boundaries, the documentation says Copilot is off by default until an admin allows data to be processed outside the region. Thai organisations should have IT and legal review this together.
• Language: the documentation says multilingual use is not officially supported; non-English prompts may occasionally return relevant responses. In practice, write prompts in English.

The mechanism: why the semantic model must be ready

Microsoft Learn warns that without preparing the semantic model, Copilot can misinterpret the data and return generic or inaccurate results, because the AI uses table names, column names and descriptions as clues.

• Rename columns meaningfully, for example from "AMT_NET" to "Net Sales"
• Write descriptions for key measures, stating whether they include VAT or deduct returns
• Hide unused columns to reduce options the AI might pick wrongly
• Check that relationships between tables are correct

Example: a distributor in practice

The analyst tidies the semantic model as above, then uses Copilot to create a report page with an English prompt such as "Create a page showing net sales by region and month, with a comparison to target", and adjusts the layout by hand. Copilot writes the DAX for year-to-date sales, which the analyst checks against accounting reports. Finally, a narrative visual lets area managers read a summary before looking at the charts.

Copilot is only as smart as the semantic model you prepare for it.

Watch out for

• Check AI-generated DAX and numbers against the source every time, especially time-based measures.
• If a question is unrelated to the semantic model, the documentation says Copilot may answer from the model's general knowledge, which is not company data.
• The same question on unchanged data within 24 hours may return a cached answer. To get a new one, change the prompt or refresh the model.
• Copilot sees data according to the user's permissions, so set up row-level security correctly before rollout.

How to get started

1. Check with IT whether your organisation has the capacity and Copilot settings enabled.
2. Pick your most-used semantic model and fix its names and descriptions.
3. Try creating a report page with an English prompt.
4. Compare numbers with the existing report at no fewer than 3 points.
5. Teach end users to ask questions in the Copilot pane instead of requesting new reports.

To get hands-on, try the courses Power BI Copilot: your instant report assistant and Power BI Q&A: ask anything with AI on Plants.work Learn. If you have never used Power BI, start with Business data analysis with Excel and Power BI.