What is Copilot in Fabric?

Copilot and other generative AI features in preview bring new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. This article introduces you to Copilot in Fabric and tells you how it works in the different workloads. It also discusses data security and privacy, responsible use, and regional availability.

Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is a generative AI assistive technology that aims to enhance the data analytics experience in the Fabric platform for users. Copilot uses large-language models (LLMs) that attempt to facilitate user interaction with their data and items in Fabric. People who use Copilot can include people who create, manage, and consume Fabric items, including enterprise developers, self-service users, and business users.

This article helps you to understand how Copilot in Fabric works, including its architecture and cost. The information in this article is intended to guide you and your organization to use and manage Copilot effectively. This article is primarily targeted at:

• BI and analytics directors or managers: Decision makers who are responsible for overseeing the BI program and strategy, and who decide whether to enable and use Copilot in Fabric or other AI tools.

• Fabric administrators: The people in the organization who oversee Microsoft Fabric and its various workloads. Fabric administrators oversee who can use Copilot in Fabric for each of these workloads and monitor how Copilot usage affects available Fabric capacity.

• Data architects: The people responsible for designing, building, and managing the platforms and architecture that support data and analytics in the organization. Data architects consider the usage of Copilot in architecture design.

• Center of Excellence (COE), IT, and BI teams: The teams that are responsible for facilitating successful adoption and use of data platforms like Fabric in the organization. These teams and individuals might use AI tools like Copilot themselves, but also support and mentor self-service users in the organization to benefit from them, as well.

Important

Copilot in Fabric aims to augment the abilities and intelligence of human users. Copilot can't, and doesn't, aim to replace the people who today create and manage reports or other Fabric items. To get the most out of Copilot in Fabric, you should consider how you'll enable these individuals and teams to make their work more efficient or improve their outcomes.

There are different Copilots in each of the Fabric workloads, like Data Factory, Data Science, and Power BI. In Power BI Desktop, Copilot experiences are available to users with access to a workspace that uses Fabric capacity or those assigned to a Fabric Copilot capacity.

Enabling and effectively using Copilot in your organization requires deliberate thought and planning. Generative AI is an evolving technology with specific nuances and considerations to keep in mind, so it's important to apply generative AI tools like Copilot to the appropriate problems and scenarios. Furthermore, Copilot in Power BI consumes your available Fabric capacity, meaning that you should manage its usage to avoid overconsumption that can lead to throttling and disruption of your other Fabric operations.

Enable Copilot

Before your business can start using Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Fabric, you need to enable Copilot.

Note

Copilot isn't yet supported for sovereign clouds due to GPU availability.

Copilot experiences

You can enable and use Copilot across the various Fabric workloads, and within those workloads you can use different Copilot experiences. While each of these Copilot experiences uses a similar common architecture, they work in distinct ways.

The following diagram depicts an overview of the different items that support Copilot experiences for each Fabric workload.

Copilot in Fabric in the Data Science and Data Engineering workloads

Copilot for Data Engineering and Data Science is an AI-enhanced toolset tailored to support data professionals in their workflow. It provides intelligent code completion, automates routine tasks, and supplies industry-standard code templates to facilitate building robust data pipelines and crafting complex analytical models. Utilizing advanced machine learning algorithms, Copilot offers contextual code suggestions that adapt to the specific task at hand, helping you code more effectively and with greater ease. From data preparation to insight generation, Microsoft Fabric Copilot acts as an interactive aide, lightening the load on engineers and scientists and expediting the journey from raw data to meaningful conclusions.

Copilot in Fabric in the Data Factory workload

Copilot for Data Factory is an AI-enhanced toolset that supports both citizen and professional data wranglers in streamlining their workflow. It provides intelligent code generation to transform data with ease and generates code explanations to help you better understand complex tasks.

Copilot in Fabric in the Data Warehouse workload

Microsoft Copilot for Fabric Data Warehouse is an AI assistant designed to streamline your data warehousing tasks. Key features of Copilot for Warehouse include Natural Language to SQL, code completion, quick actions, and intelligent insights.

Copilot in the SQL database workload

Copilot for SQL database in Microsoft Fabric is an AI assistant designed to streamline your OLTP database tasks. Key features of Copilot for SQL database include Natural Language to SQL, code completion, quick actions, and document-based Q&A.

Copilot in Fabric in the Power BI workload

Power BI has introduced generative AI that allows you to create reports automatically by selecting the article for a report or by prompting Copilot for Power BI on a particular article. You can use Copilot for Power BI to generate a summary for the report page that you created, and generate synonyms for better Q&A capabilities.

Copilot in Fabric in the Real-Time Intelligence workload

Copilot for Real-Time Intelligence is an advanced AI tool designed to help you explore your data and extract valuable insights. You can input questions about your data, which are then automatically translated into Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries. Copilot streamlines the process of analyzing data for both experienced KQL users and citizen data scientists.