How to enable Copilot in Power BI: requirements & steps

João Barros 10 de July de 2026 4 min read

Copilot in Power BI turns natural language into report pages, summaries, and DAX measures, but it won't appear until you meet two essential requirements: a supported capacity and a setting enabled in the admin portal. Many teams set everything up and wait for a button that never shows, simply because a configuration step is missing. Knowing how to enable Copilot in Power BI the right way avoids that common mistake. Below is the full path, from prerequisites to confirming it works.

Prerequisites

A Fabric (F2 or higher) or Power BI Premium (P1 or higher) capacity in your organization.
A Fabric administrator role to change tenant settings, or a capacity administrator role.
A workspace that can be assigned to that capacity.
A semantic model with clear table and column names, which helps Copilot answer better.

Step 1: Confirm the capacity

Copilot in Power BI always runs on a paid capacity. Since April 2025, any Fabric capacity from the F2 tier is enough; alternatively, a Power BI Premium P1 capacity or higher works too. Standalone Power BI Pro licenses, on shared capacity, do not include Copilot. If you don't have a capacity yet, you can start with a Fabric trial to test. In the admin portal, under Capacity settings, confirm that at least one active capacity exists and note its name — you'll need it in Step 3.

Step 2: Enable the setting in the admin portal

Open the admin portal and go to Tenant settings. Find the Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service group and make sure the main setting is enabled:

Admin portal -> Tenant settings -> Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service
  [x] Users can use Copilot and other features powered by Azure OpenAI
  [ ] (optional) Data sent to Azure OpenAI can be processed outside
      your capacity's geographic region, compliance boundary,
      or national cloud instance

The first setting turns Copilot on for the whole organization; if you prefer, restrict it to specific security groups during a pilot. The second is only needed when your capacity's region doesn't yet have the local Azure OpenAI service — enabling it authorizes requests to be processed in another region. Save your changes, as propagation can take a few minutes.

Step 3: Assign the workspace to the capacity

Copilot only appears in reports saved in a workspace linked to the right capacity. Open the workspace settings, on the license tab, and select the Fabric (F2+) or Premium capacity. Without this step, the Copilot button won't show even with the tenant setting already enabled — it's the number one cause of "I can't see Copilot".

Step 4: Open Copilot in a report

Open a report from that workspace in the Power BI service and click the Copilot button in the top bar. In Power BI Desktop, the Copilot button is on the Home tab of the ribbon. Start with a simple, specific request, naming the topic and the dimensions you want to see:

Create a report page about sales by region and month

If the Copilot pane opens and returns relevant content, the setup is complete. Vague prompts tend to give vague answers, so it pays to be concrete.

Verify the result

Check three signs that Copilot in Power BI is active: the Copilot button appears in the report bar (service) or on the ribbon (Desktop); when clicked, the pane opens with no missing-capacity warning; and a test request returns content. If the button doesn't appear, review the workspace capacity (Step 3) and the tenant setting (Step 2). If it appears disabled, you almost always still need to assign the workspace to an F2+ or P1 capacity.

Conclusion

With the right capacity, the admin portal setting turned on, and the workspace assigned, Copilot in Power BI is ready to create pages, summaries, and measures from natural language. The next step is improving answer quality: add descriptions to your model's tables and measures so Copilot understands your business vocabulary. Which report will you ask Copilot to build first?