Explore data with Copilot for Power BI

  • 2 minutes

Power BI dashboards are about having a user-friendly experience. When users first interact with data, they often have more questions — and answering each one individually isn't sustainable. Power BI addresses this by letting users explore data directly using natural language, through Copilot for Power BI.

Important

Power BI previously offered a Q&A feature for natural language data exploration on dashboards. Q&A is being retired in December 2026. Copilot for Power BI is the recommended replacement, offering a more advanced and integrated experience for querying your data using natural language.

Explore data with Copilot for Power BI

Copilot for Power BI is available in the Power BI service. To open it, select Copilot in the left navigation bar.

From the Copilot pane, you can type questions in plain language about any reports and semantic models you have access to — for example:

  • What were the total sales by region last quarter?
  • Which product category had the highest growth this year?
  • Show me a breakdown of expenses by department.

Copilot queries the underlying semantic model and returns a visualization or summary that answers your question.

Ask questions in context of a report

When viewing a report in the Power BI service, you can open the Copilot pane to ask follow-up questions about the visuals you see. Copilot uses the report and its semantic model as context, so you can refer to things naturally — for example, "show me this data by month" or "which region is performing below average?"

Copilot can help you in several ways:

  • Summarize report pages — Get a narrative summary of the key findings on a page, useful when a report is complex or unfamiliar.

  • Answer data questions — Ask about specific values, comparisons, or trends in the semantic model. Copilot can even calculate new values on demand using DAX.

  • Generate visualizations — Describe a chart you want to see and Copilot creates it for you.

Pin Copilot answers to your dashboard

When Copilot returns a visualization that answers your question, you can pin it directly to a new or existing dashboard — the same way you pin any report visual. This makes Copilot a fast way to build dashboards: instead of hunting through reports for the right chart, ask the question and pin the answer in seconds.

For more information, see Copilot for Power BI overview.