💁 About this article
This article is part of Fugo’s Power BI knowledge base: a collection of resources answering common Power BI questions. We include notes throughout where Fugo’s integration may be helpful for displaying dashboards on digital signage.
Table of contents
Short answer
It depends on who you are and what you expect it to do. Power BI Copilot tends to be more useful for:
End users exploring data
Executives consuming summaries
Teams early in analysis
It is often frustrating for:
Experienced report builders
DAX-heavy workflows
Teams expecting automation of formatting or modeling work
This gap between expectations and reality is a common theme in real-world usage.
What practitioners say Copilot does well
Based on community feedback and hands-on use, Copilot is generally seen as helpful for:
Narrative summaries that explain charts in plain language
Natural language querying when models are carefully prepared
Generating rough report layouts for unfamiliar datasets
These features save time after the hard modeling work is done.
Where Copilot falls short in practice
Experienced users frequently report issues with:
DAX suggestions that are technically valid but logically wrong
Inability to modify or refine visuals it creates
Weak support for formatting, layout, and design consistency
Prompts taking longer to write than doing the task manually
A recurring frustration is that Copilot feels constrained compared to general-purpose AI tools, while still requiring careful supervision.
Why expectations matter so much
Copilot is branded as “AI,” but its effectiveness depends far more on:
Metadata quality
Semantic model design
Predefined synonyms and relationships
When those foundations are weak, Copilot’s output quickly degrades. When they’re strong, Copilot feels more like a convenience feature than intelligence.
A common pattern teams run into
Many teams:
Enable Copilot
Expect faster report building
Discover it’s better at explaining than creating
Continue building reports manually
Use Copilot mainly for summaries and Q&A
That doesn’t make Copilot useless; it just makes its role narrower than marketing suggests.
Where this leaves Copilot today
Power BI Copilot currently works best as:
A companion to good modeling
A layer for explanation and exploration
A feature for report consumers more than creators
It is still evolving, but today it does not eliminate the need for Power BI expertise.
Power BI beyond the desktop
Copilot focuses on report creation and interpretation, not distribution.
When the goal is to share Power BI insights continuously on screens - without logins, mouse input, or manual refresh - teams typically pair Power BI with a digital signage platform like Fugo, which is designed specifically for always-on, shared display environments.
Learn more 👉 Power BI in Fugo