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Turn off Copilot at semantic model or report level

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Mike Honey on 17 May 2024 04:26:21

Copilot is great, or it will be great some day. But at present the only options are to turn it on for all reports & semantic models in a tenant, or turn it off. Please provide more nuanced control e.g. turn off for an individual report or semantic model. Workspace or capacity might be other convenient control points.


"Security" in the wider sense for Power BI often relies on users with Viewer access only having access to pages with visuals, filters etc that constrain what data they can view. Copilot has the potential to be a new "vector" revealing data that has previously remained hidden. As it is a totally obscure feature to Power BI authors/admins and allows Power BI viewers to type in questions, there doesn't seem to be any practical way to guarantee particular results cannot be extracted.


We already have this capability for Q&A - can turn off at the PBIX file or semantic model level.


Many semantic models are not ready to be exposed via Copilot - there are many preparation steps that may be required e.g. renaming columns, dropping redundant data. Surely it is better to give report authors & workspace admins control over when to reveal a semantic model via Copilot? At present, it is open slather for all semantic models, so resources are being wasted generating Copilot results that are often gibberish or halucinatory. This is a poor first experience for Copilot users, and can damage the brand of that product as well as Power BI.

Comments (2)
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Ben Howard on 10 Jul 2024 13:52:03

RE: Turn off Copilot at semantic model or report level

I would like to add to this, and specifically I am talking about Copilot in the service, as used by a report view. Copilot will generate information based upon the report, or the model. Exposing data in the model which has not been exposed on a report page is potentially damaging. I'd like the option, at the model level, to restrict the search domain Copilot will operate in to one of three options. 1) Copilot should search the report only (inc hidden pages). 2) Copilot should search the report on (excl. hidden pages). 3) Copilot should search the report and the model. I think it is important to provide the option to includes/exclude hidden pages, as hidden pages often include report data made visible by navigation buttons. Taking this a stage further, I would ideally like a choice of pages on which to search, in the same way the Copilot option in the narrative visual allows a choice of pages and visualisations in which to search.

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Carl Polk on 02 Jul 2024 00:50:13

RE: Turn off Copilot at semantic model or report level

BE nice to have this control in the registry like they do now with the GIS and other options in Power BI