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Microsoft Power BI Blog

Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is now generally available in the Power BI experience

Headshot of article author Kim Manis

Vice President of Product Management
May 21, 2024

In the right hands, new innovations have always sparked transformation. From the combustion engine to the creation of the web, these innovations reshaped how we interact with the world around us. And today, we are seeing the next great shift with AI. It’s one of the most exciting innovations of our generation, and its impact is already being felt across individuals, entire teams, and industries. Use cases range from customer service chat to better knowledge mining, to content generation and speech analytics.

One of the biggest opportunities we’re seeing is in accelerating the path to a data-rich culture by enhancing the productivity of your data teams and making analytics more accessible to every user. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in bringing to life Copilot in Microsoft Fabric—an AI experience embedded directly into Microsoft Fabric that can help every user unlock the full potential of their data. We are thrilled to share that Copilot in Fabric is now generally available, starting with the Microsoft Power BI experience.

Elcome, one of the world’s largest marine electronics companies, used Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Fabric to build a new service called “Welcome” that helps maritime crews stay connected to their families and friends.

“With a three-person development team, we were able to leverage Microsoft Fabric and Copilot to build out an ISP-grade monitoring and management platform that is scalable, flexible, and future-proof. Leveraging Microsoft Fabric and Copilot allows them to focus on customer safety and connectivity while at sea, without having to be data scientists,” said Jimmy Grewal, Managing Director of Elcome. 

Copilot in Fabric is now generally available

With Copilot in Fabric, you can use simple conversational language to integrate, transform, prepare, and visualize your data. In the Power BI experience, Copilot can help you create stunning reports and summarize your insights into narrative summaries in seconds. You can simply provide a high-level prompt, and Copilot in Fabric will create an entire report page for you by identifying the tables, fields, measures, and charts relevant to your prompt and adding visuals that best highlight insights in your data. It’s a fast and easy way to get started with a report.

You can also generate custom summaries and answers to questions about the data visualized across the report, taking analysis from hours or even days down to seconds. Previously, Copilot could only summarize or answer questions about one page at a time, but we are expanding its capabilities to support full report summaries and questions.

The general availability of Copilot in Fabric for the Power BI workload will be rolling out over the coming weeks to all customers with Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) or Fabric capacity (F64 or higher).     

While the report creation experience is now generally available, there are other Copilot experiences in Power BI that are available in preview. For example, the Copilot-powered “Data overview” button in the Explore experience provides a summary of your semantic model to help you get started and can even generate synonyms and linguistic relationships to ready your model for natural language interpretation. You can also use Copilot to help you write and explain DAX queries in the DAX query view. And, when creating a report, you can add the Narrative video to summarize the insights on the report page into a written form—helping you communicate the insights that matter most about the data.

We are also excited to share an expansion of Copilot’s capabilities to answer your data-driven questions. Copilot will not only answer the questions about the visuals on your report pages but can search across the entire semantic model. This feature is available in preview in both edit and view modes in the Power BI service.

The Copilot in Fabric experiences for Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehouse, and Real-Time Intelligence are also all still available in preview. Copilot in Fabric is also now enabled on-by-default for all eligible tenants, including the preview experiences.

Create Q&A experiences with AI skills

We are also thrilled to release a new capability, powered by Copilot, called AI skills—now in preview. AI skills is designed to provide a conversational Q&A experience that users can interact with to learn more about their data. With AI skills, you can select the data source you want to explore in Fabric and simply start asking questions about the data. The AI skill will respond with not only the answer, but the query it used to find the answer. And while it requires no configuration to get started, you can enhance the experience by adding more tables, setting additional context, and configuring settings. AI skills can empower everyone to explore data, build and configure AI experiences, and get the answers and insights they need.

Model explorer and DAX query view are now generally available

We are excited to help analysts work even faster and more effectively by releasing the model explorer into general availability.

The model explorer in the model view in Power BI provides end-to-end visibility of your semantic model in a single tree view, helping you find items in your data fast. With the model explorer, you can find items in the search bar, expand and collapse the tree view, see how many of each item are in your semantic mode, and get a single pane access to create or edit semantic model items. You can also use the model explorer to create calculation groups and reduce the number of measures by reusing calculation logic and simplifying semantic model consumption.

 

The DAX query view in Power BI Desktop gives users the ability to write, edit, and see the results of Data Analysis Expressions or DAX queries on data in their semantic model. Similar to the Explore feature, users working with a model can validate data and measures without having to build a visual or use an additional tool. With the DAX query view, you can employ a quick query to preview data or show summary statistics to help you better understand the data without creating visuals or writing a DAX query. You can also see multiple measures at once in the editor, make changes, run the query to rest, and update the model—all from the save view. You can debug visuals by seeing the DAX query used by the visual to get data. And finally, you can create and run your own DAX queries and even define and use measures and variables for that DAX query that do not exist in the model.

 

Explore all the updates across Microsoft Fabric

We are excited to announce additions to the Microsoft Fabric workloads that will make Microsoft Fabric’s capabilities even more robust and customizable to meet the unique needs of each organization. These enhancements include:

  • A completely redesigned workload, Real-Time Intelligence, that brings together and enhances Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator to help you analyze and act on high-volume, high-granular event streaming data and even explore your organization’s real-time data in the new Real-Time hub. To learn more about the Real-Time Intelligence workload, watch the “Ingest, analyze and act in real time with Microsoft Fabric” session at Microsoft Build 2024.
  • A new Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit, currently in preview, that makes it easier for software developers and customers to design, build, and interoperate applications within Microsoft Fabric. Applications built with this kit will appear as a native workload within Fabric, and software developers can publish and monetize their custom workloads through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Learn more by watching the “Extend and enhance your analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session.
  • We are empowering developers with API for GraphQL and user data functions in Microsoft Fabric. API for GraphQL is a flexible and powerful RESTful API that allows data professionals to access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. User data functions are user-defined functions built for Microsoft Fabric experiences across all data services, such as notebooks, pipelines, or event streams. You can watch these features in action in the “Introducing API for GraphQL and User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session.
  • A new feature in the Data Factory experience called data workflows, powered by Apache Airflow, that can help you author, schedule, and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python.
  • An expansion of OneLake shortcuts to connect to data from on-premises and network-restricted data sources beyond just Azure Data Lake Service Gen2, now in preview. To learn more about this announcement, watch the Microsoft Build session “Unify your data with OneLake and Microsoft Fabric.“
  • New Copilot in Fabric experience for Real-Time Intelligence, currently in preview, that enables users to explore real-time data with ease. Starting with a Kusto Query Language (KQL) Queryset connected to a KQL Database in an Eventhouse or a standalone Azure Data Explorer database, you can type your question in conversational language and Copilot will automatically translate it to a KQL query you can execute.
  • An expansion of our existing partnership with Snowflake to create interoperability between Snowflake and Fabric’s OneLake, including support for the Apache Iceberg standard in OneLake and bi-directional data access. Coming first, you will be able to shortcut data from Snowflake and all Apache Iceberg data sources into OneLake.
  • Coming soon, you will be able to access Microsoft Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly in Fabric, making it even easier to unify Azure Databricks with Fabric. Also coming soon, Fabric users will be able to access Fabric data items like lakehouses as a catalog in Azure Databricks.

Check out this video to see a sneak peak of all these announcements:

To learn more about these announcements and others coming to Fabric, check out the Microsoft Fabric blog.

Watch these announcements in action at Microsoft Build 2024

Join us at Microsoft Build from May 21 to 23, 2024, to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions:

  1. “Microsoft Build opening keynote” with Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott, and Rajesh Jha.
  2. “Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud” with Scott Guthrie.
  3. “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” with Arun Ulagaratchagan and Amir Netz.
  4. “Ingest, analyze and act in real time with Microsoft Fabric” with Yitzhak Kesselman and Tessa Kloster.
  5. “Extend and enhance your analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric” with Dipti Borkar and Teddy Bercovitz.
  6. “GraphQL API and User Defined Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric” with Monica Boris and Dipti Borkar.
  7. “Unify your data with OneLake and Microsoft Fabric” with Josh Caplan and Priya Sathy.
  8. “Accelerate insights with real-time Azure SQL data and Microsoft Fabric” with Anna Hoffman and Bob Ward.
  9. “Integrating Azure AI and Microsoft Fabric for Next-Gen AI Solutions” with Nellie Gustafsson and Facundo Santiago.
  10. “Activate enterprise data in AI-enabled business applications” with Rakesh Krishnan and Srikumar Nair.

You can also try out these new capabilities and everything Fabric has to offer yourself by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no credit card information required. To start your free trial, sign up for a free account (Power BI customers can use their existing account), and once signed in, select start trial within the account manager tool in the Fabric app. Existing Power BI Premium customers can already access Microsoft Fabric by simply turning on Fabric in their Fabric admin portal. Learn more on the Fabric get started page.

Join us at the Power Platform and Fabric Community Conferences

If you want to get hands-on experience with everything Power BI and Fabric have to offer, please join us at these upcoming Power Platform and Fabric Community conferences:

At all three events, you will hear from leading Microsoft and community experts from around the world and get hands-on experiences with the latest features from Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, the rest of Microsoft Power Platform, and more. You can learn directly from the people behind the products while having the chance to interact with your peers and share your story. Register for the events today and see how cutting-edge technologies from Microsoft can enable your business success.

Explore additional resources for Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Power BI and Microsoft Fabric: