- Since 2025 Copilot for Power BI works on the smallest paid Fabric capacities, dropping the entry point by roughly a factor of thirty and bringing AI reporting into SMB budget range.
- Copilot can now summarize a report in plain language, build and adjust the data model in natural language, draft a report from a description, and embed an AI narrative for outside clients.
- Microsoft Fabric is becoming the data backbone, including letting Microsoft 365 Copilot reach governed Fabric data to answer questions from your actual numbers.
- Microsoft is retiring the Power BI Q&A natural-language features in December 2026, so reports relying on them need a plan to move those interactions to Copilot.
Microsoft has been moving fast on Power BI, its reporting tool, and Microsoft Fabric, the broader data platform underneath it. Two years of updates boil down to one theme for a small or mid-sized business: AI-assisted reporting just got a lot more reachable, and a couple of old features are going away. Here's what matters.
The big one: Copilot for Power BI is no longer enterprise-only
For a while, getting Copilot (Microsoft's AI assistant) inside Power BI meant buying a large, expensive Fabric capacity that only big companies could justify. Since 2025, Copilot works on the smallest paid Fabric capacities. That moves AI-assisted reporting from "someday, when we're bigger" into the range of a normal SMB budget.
If you looked at Copilot for Power BI a year ago and decided it was out of reach, that math has changed. The entry point dropped by roughly a factor of thirty. It's worth a fresh look.
What Copilot actually does in Power BI now
The capabilities worth knowing for a business audience:
- Summarize a report in plain language, so a reader gets the key trends and changes without studying every chart.
- Help build and adjust the data model in natural language (renaming tables, creating relationships, writing the formulas), which lowers the bar for whoever maintains your reports.
- A report-authoring assistant that drafts a report from a description, instead of building every visual by hand.
- Embed an AI-written narrative in a report you share with outside clients, without making them sign in.
The person who builds your dashboards gets faster, and the people who read them get answers in words, not just charts.
Fabric is quietly becoming the data backbone
Microsoft Fabric is where your data gets stored, cleaned, and prepared before Power BI shows it. The 2025 and 2026 updates keep knitting it together with the rest of the Microsoft world, including letting Microsoft 365 Copilot reach governed Fabric data, so an AI assistant can answer a question using your actual numbers instead of a guess. For most SMBs that's a later project, but it's the direction to plan toward if data is becoming central to how you run.
One thing to put on the calendar
Microsoft is retiring the Power BI Q&A features (the natural-language question box on dashboards and its embedded versions) in December 2026. If any of your reports rely on that, you'll want a plan to move those interactions to Copilot before it goes away.
What to do about it
Two practical moves. First, if cost was the only reason you skipped Copilot for Power BI, re-price it now. Second, treat the steady stream of Power BI updates the way you'd treat a release wave: glance at it a couple of times a year and ask whether anything replaces manual report-building or a tool you pay for.
If you want a quick read on whether AI-assisted reporting is now worth turning on for your team, and what it would cost at your size, that's an easy conversation. Let's talk it through.