Forum Discussion
Helper IVHigh Copilot and AI cost
Hello AJAJ,
Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Fabric Community Forum. Also, thanks to lbendlin , for those inputs on this thread.Copilot doesn’t charge based on how big your tables are. Even if the data is small, Copilot runs multiple background steps for every question a user asks. Because of that, the compute usage becomes a bit higher than what we normally expect with simple SQL or Power BI queries. So the cost you are seeing right now is normal behaviour.
When this goes to a bigger user base, the load comes mainly from the AI requests, not from the data size. That’s why higher capacities are usually suggested it’s just to handle the AI workload smoothly.
At the moment there isn’t any special setting to reduce Copilot-related cost. The best way is to limit who can use Copilot during the POC and keep checking the capacity metrics to understand where the usage is coming from.
Your current setup is fine, and you’re not using it incorrectly. This is simply how Copilot processes queries in the background.
Let me know if you want me to check anything specific.
Regards,
Community Support Team.
Helper IVI totally get your concern about Copilot costs scaling with more users, it's a real issue many teams face when trying to bring AI insights to everyone. From my experience, one way to reduce AI-related costs is to explore custom solutions that run inside your existing dashboards without per-user licensing. For example, I built PowerMind as an embedded AI assistant that works directly in Power BI and doesn’t require Copilot licenses, which can help control costs when rolling out to hundreds of users. If you’re open to alternatives, you can check out a quick demo of how it works here: