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Power BI Agentic overview

Power BI Agentic is a set of agent skills and tools that improve your experience when developing Power BI with AI coding agents such as GitHub Copilot. It's not a Power BI feature you turn on — it's a curated bundle you install into your agent so the agent can build and refine Power BI semantic models and reports using natural language.

It combines two building blocks:

  • Agent skills — Folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that an agent loads on demand to follow Power BI authoring best practices. Skills cover both semantic model authoring (designing a star schema, writing DAX, structuring a PBIP project, preparing a model for AI) and report authoring (creating pages and visuals, formatting, and validating PBIR report definitions).
  • Tools — MCP servers and CLI bridges that let the agent inspect schemas, run DAX, edit semantic models, validate reports, and drive Power BI Desktop directly — for example, reloading a model or capturing screenshots for visual verification.

Skills tell the agent what to do. Tools let the agent do it. Used together, they turn a natural-language prompt into a working semantic model or report.

Get started

The recommended way to get started is installing the powerbi-authoring plugin from the Skills for Fabric marketplace. The plugin bundles the skills and tools you need to author Power BI content with an AI agent:

  • Power BI agent skills, semantic model skills for semantic model creation, editing, deployment, and AI readiness, and the report authoring skills for building and validating PBIR report definitions.
  • The Power BI Modeling MCP server, registered automatically so the agent can connect to Power BI Desktop and Fabric workspaces.

Without the plugin, you'd register MCP server and add each skill manually. The plugin wires them up in a single command so you can go from install to prompting in minutes.

Note

Skills for Fabric is optimized for GitHub Copilot CLI and provides cross-tool compatibility shims for VS Code Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex/Jules, and Windsurf. The install scripts configure the appropriate compatibility files automatically.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have:

Install the plugin with GitHub Copilot CLI

  1. Add the skills-for-fabric marketplace and install the powerbi-authoring plugin:

    copilot plugin marketplace add microsoft/skills-for-fabric
copilot plugin install powerbi-authoring@fabric-collection

  2. Start GitHub Copilot and confirm the Power BI skills are loaded by running:

    /skills

    Verify that skills such as semantic-model-authoring appear in the list.

Install the plugin with Visual Studio Code

To install the plugin in VS Code, follow the steps in Customize AI in Visual Studio Code and search for the powerbi-authoring plugin.

Skills

Skill Description
semantic-model-authoring Create, edit, deploy, and manage Power BI semantic models across Power BI Desktop, PBIP projects, and the Fabric service. Covers Import, DirectQuery, and Direct Lake models; DAX measures, tables, columns, and relationships; deployment, refresh, data sources and permissions; and DAX performance optimization.
power-bi-report-authoring Create, edit and validate Power BI report in the PBIR (Power BI Report) format used by PBIP (Power BI Project) files.
power-bi-report-design Produce a structured design brief to provide design guidance for Power BI reports in the PBIR format used by PBIP.
power-bi-report-planner Follow a guided workflow to define, plan, and build a new Power BI report from an existing semantic model
power-bi-report-management Get, publish and manage Power BI reports in Microsoft Fabric workspaces.

For the full list of skills and to discover new ones as they're released, see microsoft/skills-for-fabric.

Tools

Tool Description
Power BI MCP server Local MCP server that lets the agent inspect schemas, run DAX, and edit semantic models in Power BI Desktop or Microsoft Fabric. Registered automatically by the powerbi-authoring plugin.
Power BI Desktop Bridge Local server hosted within the Power BI Desktop process which enables external tools to communicate with a running instance of Power BI Desktop on the local machine.

Next steps

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