Copilot in Fabric is not fully GA yet

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Microsoft’s announcement that Copilot in Fabric is generally available (GA), made at its Build conference in mid-May 2024, was misleading and incomplete. Attendees left Build under the impression that Copilot in Fabric was GA across the board, when, in reality, only one Copilot feature in the Power BI experience made it to GA. All other Copilot features in Power BI were still in preview as of the end of May 2024. And more importantly, Copilot in all the other Fabric experiences (Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Science, and Real-Time Intelligence) remain in preview. None of them is GA.

(Update: June 3, 2024, the ability to generate a narrative in response to user questions about a Power BI report’s data is now GA.)

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Copilot and think it will be a great productivity and analytic tool that helps data analysts, developers, and end-users. But organizations need to make decisions about when they adopt tools and how they spend their time. Customers often review features in preview, but never deploy them to production. And that’s my problem with Microsoft’s false announcement. Customers could be making bad decisions about evaluating and deploying Copilot in Fabric.

Following the blog trail

At the 43:35 point of the “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” presentation, delivered by Fabric Chief Technical Officer Amir Netz, he announced that Copilot in Fabric is generally available. And even strengthened the announcement with a slide dedicated to the GA announcement.

At first, I was excited and looked at my calendar to find time to delve into the various Copilots in Fabric. But then… I started reading through the Microsoft blog post that came out on the same day, entitled “Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is now generally available in the Power BI experience.” As an analyst, the long title was the first clue. Long titles like that are almost always a marketing technique to try to make a little announcement sound big. The blog post clarified the key points that Netz didn’t cover. Notably, “While the report creation experience is now generally available, there are other Copilot experiences in Power BI that are available in preview.” In the same section, the blog post further stated, “The Copilot in Fabric experiences for Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehouse, and Real-Time Intelligence are also all still available in preview.”

There’s one more thing: There was another important announcement in the blog post that wasn’t discussed at Build. “Copilot in Fabric is also now enabled on-by-default for all eligible tenants, including the preview experiences.” By eligible tenant, Microsoft means “customers with a paid Fabric capacity (F64 or higher) or Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) have access to Copilot.”

Currently, the ability to use Copilot preview features is either on or off for everyone. There’s no setting that allows customers to limit use during evaluation. A new feature is expected to limit its use by capacity, but that has not arrived yet. For more details, take a look at this support post.

My Recommendation

I, personally, plan to use Copilot in Fabric extensively when it really hits GA. But these features are not GA, so please don’t use them in production. Preview features are not supported by Microsoft, and the features will likely change before they reach GA. This means if customers aren’t careful, they could end up spending a lot more than they expected simply evaluating preview features.