How to enable Copilot in Microsoft Fabric: step by step

João Barros 07 de July de 2026 4 min read

Copilot in Microsoft Fabric lets you transform data, write code, and build visualizations from natural-language instructions, saving data teams a lot of time. Before you can use it in a Notebook, a Dataflow, or a Power BI report, it must be turned on for your tenant and tied to a compatible capacity. Enabling Copilot in Microsoft Fabric with minimal risk is simple once you follow the right steps.

Prerequisites

A paid Fabric capacity (F2 or higher) or a Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher). Pro and PPU workspaces do not support Copilot directly.
The capacity must be in a supported region for Copilot.
Fabric (tenant) administrator permissions — or capacity administrator, if settings are delegated.
A workspace assigned to that capacity, where you will create the items that use Copilot.

Step 1: Confirm the capacity and region

Copilot only works in workspaces assigned to a Fabric capacity of F2 or higher (or P1+). In the Azure portal, open your Fabric capacity and check the SKU and region. If you only have Pro or PPU licenses, you need to create a Fabric Copilot capacity and assign the workspace to it. It is also worth checking, in the region availability documentation, that your region supports Copilot — otherwise you will have to allow processing outside the region in the next step.

Step 2: Open the Fabric admin portal

Sign in to the service at app.fabric.microsoft.com with an administrator account. Click the settings icon (the gear, top right) and choose Admin portal. This is where you control Copilot for the whole organization. Note: Copilot in Fabric is enabled by default; these steps help you confirm the settings or turn it back on if your organization disabled it.

Step 3: Enable the tenant settings

Inside the Admin portal, open Tenant settings and find the Copilot section. Enable these two settings:

Users can use Copilot and other features powered by Azure OpenAI — turns Copilot on for the organization.

Data sent to Azure OpenAI can be processed outside your capacity's geographic region, compliance boundary, or national cloud instance — required if your capacity is in a region without Azure OpenAI.

Best practice: instead of enabling it for the entire organization, apply each setting to specific security groups. That way you control who uses Copilot and avoid unexpected capacity consumption.

Step 4: Check delegated capacity settings

If Copilot management is delegated to capacity administrators, enabling the tenant is not enough. Go to Capacity settings, choose your capacity, and also enable the Users can use Copilot and other features powered by Azure OpenAI setting there. Without this step, users on that capacity still will not see Copilot.

Step 5: Assign the workspace and grant access

Finally, make sure your workspace is assigned to the capacity with Copilot enabled (under Workspace settings > License info) and that users have a workspace role (Admin, Member, or Contributor). Items that use Copilot — Notebooks, Dataflows, reports — must live in this workspace.

Verify the result

Open a Notebook or a Power BI report inside that workspace and look for the Copilot button in the ribbon. If the Copilot pane appears, you are ready. For a quick test in a Notebook, ask Copilot something simple in natural language (for example, "show the first 5 rows of the vendas table") and confirm that it generates code like this:

df = spark.read.format("delta").load("Tables/vendas")
display(df.limit(5))

If the button does not appear, wait a few minutes (Copilot rolls out gradually) and review steps 3 and 4.

Conclusion

With Copilot enabled and the workspace on the right capacity, your team can generate code, summarize data, and build visualizations much faster. The next step is to define a clear usage policy — which groups get access and how to monitor capacity consumption — before rolling it out to the whole organization. Do you already know which region your Fabric capacity is in and whether it supports Copilot without out-of-region processing?