Microsoft Copilot – what is it?

Without a doubt, we can say that a new era of artificial intelligence has arrived, completely changing how we perceive and use technology.

With the ability to combine chat interfaces and large language models, we can give commands in natural language, and the technology is intelligent enough to respond to the requests it receives, create what it is asked to do or take any other appropriate action. Sound promising? It definitely is. In this context, it is worth learning more about the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot.

Microsoft Copilot is an innovative tool that revolutionises companies' approach to automating business processes and adapting to dynamically changing market conditions.

Leveraging the advanced technology created by OpenAI and the powerful GPT-4 language model, Microsoft has brought to market an intelligent solution capable of rapidly generating programming code, creating corporate content or documents, and significantly streamlining business processes, resulting in increased business success.

Microsoft Copilot includes a range of applications, such as Microsoft Power Automation, Microsoft Viva Copilot, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, Microsoft Azure Business Optimisation, and Power BI. Each platform offers unique features, enabling companies to optimise their business processes.

The main advantage of Microsoft Copilot is the versatility of the service. Companies can tailor the tools to their needs by selecting the appropriate service package. This flexibility makes problem-solving intuitive and the whole process more efficient, supporting the stable growth of the organisation.

Copilot for the Power BI service

From January 2024, the Copilot for Microsoft Fabric Public Preview feature is available in the Power BI service. For a company to start using it, the administrator must enable the Copilot solution in the Microsoft Fabric service. It helps to harness the transformative power of generative artificial intelligence to extract the most effective potential from data.

In the Power BI service, Copilot can be used in several different ways. The primary and most apparent is opening the Copilot panel and asking Copilot to create a report page or summary.

Copilot can also create a narrative visualisation summarising a page or the entire report.

In addition, Copilot can generate synonyms for questions and answers to make it easier for report recipients to find what they are looking for in the report.

Other practical examples of using Copilot in Microsoft Power BI include:

- Creating a report outline with suggested pages:

Copilot can produce a dataset summary and an outline of suggested report pages. Although the result of the work may not be perfect and not exactly what the user expected, having a starting point, modifications can be made according to preferences.

- Visualisations for individual pages:

With Copilot, visualisations can be created that generate a textual summary of the data presented in the canvas of the report. These visuals include suggested prompts and space to tailor the summary to specific needs while offering the end user an easy-to-read, helpful guide. Significantly, the summary can be updated in line with fragmenters and filters as data is refreshed.

Example report page prompts

Before we discuss examples, it is worth finding out what a prompt is in practice.

The word has been increasingly used recently in interaction with artificial intelligence systems. A prompt is a text that serves as a command or instruction to the system. It can be a question, a request to perform a specific action, or a request to analyse a particular data set.

Prompts are crucial when communicating with artificial intelligence, as they determine how AI will interpret the requests made to it, ultimately resulting in a response that aligns with the user's expectations.

Here are some examples of prompts that work well in Copilot for Power BI:

- Sales performance by product

"Create a page to analyse the sales volume, revenue and profit margin of different products, categories and subcategories over time and across regions."

- Customer segmentation and loyalty

"Create a page to identify and compare the customer segments' characteristics, behaviours and preferences based on demographic, geographical and transactional data."

- Promotion of effectiveness and return on investment

"Create a page to assess the impact and ROI of various promotions on sales, revenue, customer acquisition and retention."

- Inventory and supply chain management

"Create a page to monitor and optimise inventory levels, safety stock and costs of various products and product lines based on demand, lead time and production costs."

- Create a table of contents

"Create a table of contents for this report, including a brief description of each page."

Implementing Copilot in Power BI - entrust this sentence to the specialists

With Copilot and other generative artificial intelligence capabilities, the Microsoft Fabric service offers a new way to transform and analyse data, generate detailed information and create visualisations and reports in a Power BI environment.

Before your business takes full advantage of Copilot in Microsoft Power BI, you may have questions about how it works, how business data security is ensured, how privacy requirements are adhered to, and how to use generative artificial intelligence responsibly.

You do not need to find the answers to all these questions yourself. EBIS specialists are happy to guide you step-by-step through the critical stages of implementing a data analytics system. Many years of experience backed by knowledge guarantees the success of the entire project - from analysing your business needs to selecting analytical solutions, system implementation, development, maintenance and user training.