Among Microsoft’s Build announcements this year (23 May 2023), one especially caught the attention of those of us who work with Power BI: the arrival of Copilot, a generative-AI assistant built into the tool itself. The idea is as direct as it is powerful: ask Power BI in natural language for what previously had to be built by hand. Let’s look at what it really means.
What Copilot in Power BI is
Copilot is a generative-AI assistant built into the Power BI experience. Instead of starting from a blank page, the user describes what they want in natural language and Copilot proposes the result. It draws on the same wave of models that ChatGPT has made popular, but applied to the specific context of your reports and your data model.
It is one of the central pieces of Microsoft’s new data strategy, presented alongside Fabric at the same Build.
What it will let you do
Based on what was shown at the announcement, Copilot aims to cover several of an analyst’s day-to-day tasks:
- Generating reports and visualisations from a written description: “create a page showing sales by region and their monthly evolution”.
- Writing DAX from natural language, to speed up the creation of measures and calculations.
- Natural-language summaries that explain in text what is happening in a report.
- Answering questions about the data, bringing analysis closer to business users who do not master the tool.
The goal, overall, is to reduce mechanical work and give a first draft that the analyst iterates on, instead of always starting from scratch.
Its relationship with Microsoft Fabric
Copilot does not arrive alone: it is part of the vision of Microsoft Fabric, the new unified data platform that Microsoft presented at the same event. If that is not yet clear to you, we explain it in What is Microsoft Fabric.
The connection matters: Copilot relies on the data and the semantic model that live in the platform. The better organised that foundation is, the better the assistant’s answers will be. It is not a stray feature, but the conversational layer over a data platform.
What to expect today
Expectations need managing. Copilot in Power BI is in preview and its rollout is gradual. In addition, taking advantage of it will carry capacity requirements within the Fabric/Power BI ecosystem, something each organisation will have to weigh up according to its licensing.
Put another way: it is a highly relevant announcement and a clear product direction, but still at an early stage. This is the moment to explore and prepare, not to assume it is already in production for everyone.
The condition for it to work
Here is the message we most want to get across. Copilot is only as good as the data model it works on. If you ask it for “last quarter’s revenue” but your model has three different measures that could answer that, the assistant cannot guess which is the right one.
That is why the best investment to make the most of Copilot is not to wait for the tool, but to prepare the ground:
- A clean data model, with correct relationships and well-structured tables.
- Well-defined metrics, with clear names and a single meaning for each one.
- Documentation and governance, so that the assistant —and people— work from the same truth.
Whoever has done that work will be able to bring Copilot in with confidence as soon as it is available. Whoever has not will get unreliable answers no matter how advanced the model is.
At Digital Fox Data we help companies build that foundation —data model, DAX and governance— with our Power BI consulting, so you can take advantage of Copilot from a solid base as soon as it arrives. If you want to prepare your Power BI for the era of generative AI, let’s talk.