What can Copilot do in Power BI?

Microsoft documents several Copilot capabilities for Power BI, including answering questions about data, assisting with report creation and summarising information. Access depends on the experience, permissions and your organisation’s configuration. Microsoft’s Copilot for Power BI overview

For a report author, these capabilities can provide a starting point for exploring a model or developing a report.

For a report reader, they can offer another way to ask questions about information already available to them.

However, a useful answer still depends on the underlying model. AI cannot resolve an unclear business definition simply because the question is written in plain English.

If your organisation has three different measures called “sales”, you need to know which one the answer uses.

Where does Claude fit into a Power BI workflow?

Claude supports file analysis, including working with supplied CSV and Excel data. This makes it useful for exploring an approved extract or preparing supporting material. Claude’s file creation and analysis guidance

For example, you could ask it to review a synthetic sales export, organise reporting requirements or draft an explanation of a calculation you provide.

The examples in this article use Claude as a separate assistant. They do not assume that it is connected to your Power BI workspace or can inspect your live semantic model.

That distinction matters. A spreadsheet export does not automatically carry all the relationships, measures, permissions and filter behaviour of the Power BI report it came from.

Copilot or Claude: which should you use?

Choose based on the task and the information available.

These are suggested workflows, not a claim that one tool is always better.

The most useful option is the one that can access the right information through an approved process and produce an output you can verify.

1. Start with the business question

Before asking AI to build or explain anything, define the decision your report should support.

“Create a sales dashboard” leaves several important questions unanswered:

• Who will use it?
• Which decisions should it support?
• What counts as a sale?
• Which date determines the reporting period?
• What should users compare?

A more useful brief might be:

Suggested practice prompt

Help me define a monthly sales report for regional managers. They need to compare net invoiced revenue with target and identify regions requiring follow-up.

Before suggesting visuals, list the definitions, source fields and business rules that need confirming. Do not assume that orders, invoices and payments represent the same measure.

This is a suggested practice prompt. Adapt it to your environment and review the response before using it.

The aim is to expose missing requirements early, before they become calculations or charts.

2. Prepare your model before relying on AI answers

Power BI’s semantic model contains the structure behind your report, including tables, relationships and measures.

If that structure is confusing, asking better questions may not be enough.

Consider a model with fields named Value, Date2 and StatusFlag. A person unfamiliar with the dataset would struggle to interpret them. AI assistance also benefits from clearer context.

Microsoft provides a “Prepare data for AI” feature, currently documented as preview, to help improve Copilot results. Check the current documentation before adopting preview functionality. Prepare your data for AI

A practical model review should check whether:

• Table and field names describe their purpose.
• Measures have agreed business definitions.
• Relationships reflect how the data should connect.
• Date fields have a clear role.
• Report users can distinguish similar measures.

These are useful reporting foundations regardless of which AI tool you use.

3. Use AI to explain DAX, then test it

DAX is the formula language used for calculations in Power BI models.

Copilot can help write and explain DAX queries in DAX query view. That creates a useful opportunity to explore calculations and understand how a query works. Microsoft’s guidance on DAX and Copilot

Start with a question you can validate:

Suggested practice prompt

Explain this query in plain English. Identify the measures, filters and grouping it uses. Describe what each output row represents and suggest checks I should perform before relying on the result.

Understanding the explanation is only the first step.

Test important calculations against a small example with known results. Then check how they behave when you change the date range, select a region or remove a filter.

A formula can run successfully and still answer the wrong business question.

For example, “average revenue per customer” could mean revenue divided by every customer in the database or only customers who purchased during the selected period. Both calculations may be technically valid, but they describe different things.

4. Explore data without inventing explanations

Imagine your report shows revenue falling from $120,000 to $108,000.

That is a decrease of $12,000, or 10%.

Those figures alone do not tell you why it happened.

You might need to investigate customer activity, product mix, returns, timing or changes in the number of trading days. A confident explanation about “weak demand” would be unsupported unless the evidence establishes it.

For an approved practice extract, try:

Suggested practice prompt

Compare revenue between these two periods. Show the absolute and percentage change by region.

Separate observations supported by the data from possible explanations that require investigation. Do not present a possible explanation as an established cause.

State which columns and calculations you used.

Check the totals independently. Also confirm that both periods are complete and use the same definition of revenue.

The purpose of AI assistance here is to organise the investigation, not to remove the need for evidence.

5. Turn verified results into useful commentary

A manager usually needs more than a list of numbers. They need to understand what changed, where attention is required and what remains uncertain.

Once you have checked the figures, AI can help shape that information into a concise summary.

For example:

Suggested practice prompt

Using only these verified results, draft a 150-word update for the operations manager.

Include the overall change, the largest regional movement and two questions for follow-up. State the reporting period. Do not introduce new figures or explain causes that the evidence does not establish.

Review every sentence against the source material.

Check whether the draft changes “may have contributed” into “caused”, or turns an incomplete period into a final monthly result. Small wording changes can materially alter the message.

Can you use Copilot with Power BI Pro?

A Power BI Pro or Premium Per User licence alone is not sufficient for Copilot.

Microsoft currently lists qualifying paid organisational capacity, such as Fabric F2 or higher or Power BI Premium P1 or higher, alongside other configuration requirements. Your administrator should confirm the requirements for the particular experience you intend to use. Current Copilot requirements

Do not assume that access to another Microsoft Copilot product automatically enables Copilot in Power BI.

What should you check before sharing an AI-assisted report?

Use the same reporting standards you would apply to work produced manually.

Confirm the source, refresh date, reporting period and business definitions. Check important calculations against expected results.

Then review the narrative. Does it distinguish observations from explanations? Does it acknowledge incomplete information? Does it accurately describe the filters used?

For separate AI tools, use synthetic practice data or information approved for that tool. Removing names alone does not necessarily make a dataset suitable to upload.

Finally, open the finished report and test it. A correct answer in a conversation does not prove that the published report behaves correctly for its intended users.

Build the Power BI skills behind better AI results

AI assistance is easier to assess when you understand data preparation, relationships, measures and report design.

Those skills help you recognise when an answer is useful and when it needs further investigation.

Nexacu’s Power BI Copilot training is aimed at intermediate Power BI users who are confident with data models, measures, DAX and publishing to the Power BI Service.

If you are still developing those foundations, explore Nexacu’s Power BI courses to find a suitable starting point.

Frequently asked questions

Can Claude replace Power BI?

The workflows described here use Claude to support analysis and reporting tasks. They do not replace the Power BI model, report distribution or access controls your organisation relies on.

Can AI write correct DAX?

AI can help draft and explain calculations, but you still need to test the result against your model and business definition. Code that runs without an error is not necessarily correct.

What is a good first exercise?

Use a small synthetic dataset to compare two complete periods. Ask AI to calculate the change, explain its method and separate findings from possible causes. Check the result yourself before trying a larger task.

Do you still need to learn Power BI?

Yes. Understanding the model and calculations gives you a way to evaluate AI-generated work. It also helps you write clearer requests and identify problems before a report is shared.