The Copilot Family and What Each One Needs
A colleague in Finance messages you: "There's no Copilot button on the Sales report. Can you switch it on?" Before you can help, you need to know which Copilot she means, where your content is hosted and which licence she has. This level gives you that checklist.
All status and licence statements below come from Microsoft Learn, read on 2026-10-20. This field changes monthly, so treat every claim as true only on that date.
Task 1: Identify which Copilot experience is involved
"Copilot" is a family of tools, not one product. Do: match the colleague's request to one of these rows before you troubleshoot anything.
| # | Experience | Where it appears | What it does | Status (read 2026-10-20) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Copilot pane in reports (report agent) | Right side of an open Power BI report | Summarises the report and answers questions about that report only | Generally available |
| 2 | Standalone Copilot in Power BI (Power BI agent) | Full screen, opened from the Power BI left navigation | Finds and answers questions about any report, semantic model or Fabric data agent you have access to | Preview |
| 3 | Copilot in Power BI apps | An app's left navigation | Answers questions about the app's curated content | Preview |
| 4 | Copilot for authors | Power BI Desktop and service | Writes and explains DAX queries, suggests measure descriptions and synonyms, builds report pages | Generally available (Copilot in web modeling is preview) |
| 5 | Copilot in Fabric workloads | Inside Fabric items | Notebooks: code help (preview). Data Factory Dataflow Gen2 and pipelines: GA. Data Warehouse SQL: preview. SQL database: GA. Real-Time Intelligence KQL: GA | Mixed |
| 6 | Fabric data agents | A Fabric item you build and share | Answers plain-language questions over up to five sources: lakehouses, warehouses, semantic models, KQL databases, mirrored databases or ontologies | See the warning in Task 4 |
| 7 | Data agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams, from the Agent Store or by typing @ |
Lets business users ask your data agent questions without opening Fabric | Preview |
One difference matters for the rest of this course. The copilots are preconfigured: you cannot give them custom instructions. A data agent is configurable: you add instructions and example queries to shape its answers.
Task 2: Check the capacity behind the content
Copilot runs on organisational capacity, so the hosting comes first. Do these steps in order:
- Open the workspace that holds the report, model or agent and check which capacity it is assigned to.
- Confirm it is a paid Fabric capacity F2 or higher or Power BI Premium P1 or higher. If it is a P capacity, a data agent also needs Fabric enabled on it.
- Reject trial capacities and free SKUs: Copilot is not supported on them. A Fabric Trial counts as F64 for viewing reports, but it still gets no Copilot.
- Confirm the capacity is in a supported region. Sovereign clouds are not supported.
- Remember that a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) licence alone is not enough. PPU does not give you a Fabric capacity.
- If the capacity was just bought or scaled up, allow up to 24 hours for Copilot to pick up the change.
The standalone Copilot needs one more thing. The user must have access to either a Fabric Copilot capacity (FCC) or a workspace on a Copilot-enabled F2+ capacity. Without one of these, the standalone experience cannot be used.
An administrator must also have Copilot switched on in the tenant. You will cover those settings in Level 2.
Task 3: Work out the colleague's per-user licence and access
A suitable capacity is not enough on its own. Do: check each item on this list for the person asking.
- Viewing Power BI content on an F SKU smaller than F64: they need a Pro, PPU or individual trial licence.
- Viewing on F64 or larger, or on a P capacity: a Free licence plus the Viewer role on the workspace is enough.
- Copilot pane summaries: at least read access to the workspace, report or app.
- Adding a narrative visual or creating a report with Copilot: edit access to the workspace or report, or build access to the semantic model.
- Copilot in Power BI Desktop: write access to a workspace on a paid Fabric or Premium capacity.
- Fabric data agent: read access to each data source. For a semantic model, Read permission is enough and Build permission is not needed. Row-level and column-level security still apply.
- Data agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot: a Microsoft Copilot licence or an Office 365 commercial subscription, a user licence for each person using it, the same tenant and the same sign-in account for both, plus access to the underlying data.
Worked example. The Sales report is in a workspace on F32, and the Finance colleague has a Free licence. She cannot view the report at all, so the Copilot pane never appears. There are two fixes: give her a Pro or PPU licence, or move the workspace to F64 or larger and give her the Viewer role. If the workspace were on a Trial capacity instead, nobody would get Copilot until it moved to a paid capacity.
Task 4: Record the date you read each claim
Microsoft's pages can disagree with each other. On 2026-10-20:
- The Fabric data agent creation page (updated 2026-09-29) calls data agents generally available.
- The Release status of AI and Copilot in Fabric table (updated 2026-07-12) still lists data agents as Preview.
If you don't record where and when you read something, you can't settle a disagreement like this later. Do these steps:
- Create a licence register, for example a SharePoint list or a sheet.
- Add these columns: Claim | Source URL | Page last-updated date | Date read | Next check.
- Add one row per claim. Example: "Standalone Power BI Copilot is in preview", copilot-introduction page, updated 2026-08-31, read 2026-10-20, next check 2026-11-20.
- When two sources conflict, record both and mark the claim unconfirmed until one of them changes.
- Re-check every row monthly, and before you promise colleagues anything.
Key takeaways
- The family has seven parts: the report pane (GA), standalone Copilot (preview), Copilot in apps (preview), author features, Fabric workload copilots (mixed GA and preview), data agents, and data agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot (preview).
- Copilot needs a paid F2+ or P1+ capacity. Trial capacities and free SKUs are not supported, and Pro or PPU alone is not enough.
- Per-user licences still apply. On F SKUs below F64, viewers need Pro, PPU or an individual trial.
- Data agents can be configured with instructions and example queries; the copilots cannot.
- Write down the source and the date read for every licence and preview claim, and re-check them monthly.