Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence platform. Analysts build data models and interactive reports in Power BI Desktop, a free Windows app, and publish them to the Power BI service on the web, where colleagues view dashboards in the browser, in Microsoft Teams or on mobile. Power BI is part of Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft's broader data and analytics platform, and connects to hundreds of data sources.

Copilot is now built into Power BI. According to Microsoft's documentation (updated August 2026), the Copilot pane on reports is generally available, while the standalone, full-screen Power BI agent, Copilot in apps and Copilot in web modeling are in preview. Prompts can be up to 10,000 characters. Microsoft was named a Leader in Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.

For business users, Copilot answers questions about data, summarizes a report or topic, finds relevant reports and models, and can add summaries to report subscriptions. For report authors it can create and edit report pages, add narrative summary visuals, write DAX queries and draft descriptions for measures. For model owners, Copilot in web modeling flags unclear structures and naming and suggests improvements. Microsoft recommends preparing your semantic model for AI first, because without it Copilot can return generic or inaccurate answers.

Pricing: a free account (no credit card) lets you build reports for yourself, but sharing requires a paid license, and the free account does not include Copilot. Power BI Pro costs $14 per user per month, billed annually, and is included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5. Premium Per User costs $24 per user per month, billed annually. Microsoft Fabric capacity is sold pay-as-you-go or as a yearly reservation, which Microsoft says saves about 40.5%, and Power BI Embedded is priced separately. Copilot is not included with Pro or Premium Per User alone: it needs a paid Fabric capacity of F2 or higher or Power BI Premium P1 or higher, and its usage is billed against that capacity.

Copilot is not available on free or trial capacities or in sovereign clouds, some Copilot experiences are not yet offered in several Azure regions, and prompts in languages other than English are not officially supported. Copilot results depend heavily on a well-prepared data model, Power BI Desktop runs only on Windows, and building good models still requires learning DAX and data modeling.

Power BI suits companies already using Microsoft 365, Teams or Azure that want governed, shareable dashboards and are ready to pay for Fabric capacity to use Copilot. Small teams that only need quick AI analysis of a spreadsheet may find Julius AI or Looker Studio simpler, and Tableau is the main enterprise alternative.