Copilot changes within Power BI, and why we're not covering them

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Power BI Desktop updates for May 2025 Part two of a five-part series of blogs
A month which sees minor changes to line segments, Azure maps, calculation groups and TMDL model view, and major changes in preview for Copilot and something called "translytical task flows". Changes introduced in the May 2025 Power BI Desktop update Copilot changes within Power BI, and why we're not covering them (this blog) Improvements to TMDL model view You can now change the colour of individual segments of a line chart You can customise what appears on the base layer of Azure maps

Power BI Desktop updates for May 2025

Part two of a five-part series of blogs

A month which sees minor changes to line segments, Azure maps, calculation groups and TMDL model view, and major changes in preview for Copilot and something called "translytical task flows".

Changes introduced in the May 2025 Power BI Desktop update
Copilot changes within Power BI, and why we're not covering them (this blog)
Improvements to TMDL model view
You can now change the colour of individual segments of a line chart
You can customise what appears on the base layer of Azure maps

Posted by Andy Brown on 04 June 2025

In this blog

Reason 1 - Copilot remains in preview
Reason 2 - not everyone has Copilot
Reason 3 - I still don't see the point

Every month's update sees a slew of Copilot changes. Here are the Copilot headings for the May 2025 update:

What's new in Copilot this month.

I think there are 3 good reasons not to include Copilot in this series of blogs on what's new in Power BI Desktop each month, which I've listed below.

Reason 1 - Copilot remains in preview

If you look at the things waiting in preview, they include most (all?) new Copilot features:

An excerpt of the features which are in preivew mode in Power BI.

I try to avoid blogging on new Power BI features until they emerge from preview (though admittedly I have been known to make exceptions to this rule).

Reason 2 - not everyone has Copilot

You won't have Copilot unless it's enabled in your tenant. What this means in English is that your IT team have had to:

Agree to pay additional money to Microsoft to enable Copilot; and then
Enable it in your company's little bit of the Microsoft cloud so that it's available for individuals to use.

Strictly speaking Copilot isn't part of Power BI at all, but is instead included in an organisation's Fabric licence. The underlying rules are complicated, but suffice to say that the extra cost to your organisation will be signficant.

Reason 3 - I still don't see the point

One of the big new announcements this month is the feature to prepare your data for AI tools:

If you have Copilot enabled you'll be able to click on this button to prepare your data for Copilot to understand it.

This will encourage you to choose tables and columns that Copilot can get access to, to create some verfiied answers (basically, training your AI tool) and to add additional instructions (for example you might give guidance on how questions should be interpreted by default, or how answers should be skewed). If you've created or used a custom GPT in ChatGPT, you'll already get the idea. You're basically creating a miniature version of an AI tool which is focused specifically on your data model, and which will be able to understand it and allow users to query it intelligently.

My problem with this is that I didn't see the point of the predecessors to this feature (Q+A and Narrative visuals). Surely the purpose of Power BI Desktop reports is to let a user inspect data visually?

Notwithstanding all of the above I'm sure that at some point soon we will enable Copilot within Power BI for our course delegates and include this on our courses, but for now I think we'll stick to teaching humans to create interactive reports!

Parts of this blog
Changes introduced in the May 2025 Power BI Desktop update Copilot changes within Power BI, and why we're not covering them (this blog) Improvements to TMDL model view You can now change the colour of individual segments of a line chart You can customise what appears on the base layer of Azure maps

Some other pages relevant to the above blogs include:

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Reason 1 - Copilot remains in preview

Reason 2 - not everyone has Copilot

Reason 3 - I still don't see the point

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