Copilot moved into the distribution experience

Power BI apps were a common way to package and distribute several reports to a defined audience. The March update made Copilot available in this reading experience, allowing users to ask questions about report content and request summaries without opening every item separately. Microsoft also described additions for report authors, including help with DAX queries and measure descriptions.

The capability remained in preview. An administrator had to enable Copilot, and the workspace had to use qualifying Power BI Premium or Fabric capacity. Microsoft also added more administrative visibility into Copilot usage and capacity consumption. The release was therefore both a user feature and a new workload for platform owners to monitor.

An easier question did not change the data foundation

Directions on Microsoft described Copilot in Power BI and Fabric as a natural-language interface for writing code, analysing data and completing tasks. Its analysis also stressed the preview status and the requirement for higher-tier capacity. That offered a more measured frame than a product demonstration alone: availability, cost and maturity needed to be considered together.

Microsoft’s February update on generated measure descriptions showed why metadata mattered. Descriptions helped report authors understand how measures should be used, and Copilot could propose wording for a person to review. The same division of responsibility applied to reader questions: the model could formulate an answer, while the organisation remained responsible for the definitions behind it.

What an organisation needed to test

A pilot needed to begin with real questions from managers and specialists rather than generic demo prompts. For each question, the team had to agree on the correct answer, applicable filters and the authoritative report or measure. Different meanings of “revenue”, “active customer” or “delivery rate” could otherwise produce fluent but misleading answers.

Permissions required testing as rigorously as answer quality. Copilot should not give a reader more data than the underlying model and row-level security allowed. A useful test set therefore included users in different roles, questions touching restricted data, and checks of the sources or visuals on which an answer relied.

The March update lowered the barrier to exploring reports, but it did not make business analytics self-explanatory. Clear naming, maintained measures and explicit ownership became more visible when more people could ask questions in their own words. Management could use the feature alongside standard reports, while significant decisions still required validation against the governed data foundation.

Use inside apps also made training important. Readers needed to know which questions suited the feature, how to handle uncertainty and where to find the authoritative report. Without those expectations, a rapid summary could be mistaken for a governed analysis.

Sources

Microsoft Power BI: Copilot updates, 18 March 2024

Directions on Microsoft: Copilot for Power BI and Fabric, 4 March 2024

Microsoft Power BI: Generate measure descriptions with Copilot, 19 February 2024

Gartner: Top strategic technology trends for 2024, 16 October 2023

Further reading

Read more: What is a semantic model in Power BI?

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