Add CoPilot into free to use version of PowerBI considering CoPilot already has its own subscription

[DanielMay]

My Company recently invested in premium CoPilot for the IT department to test if it would help with business requirements, e.g. recomend a simpler and more streamlined solution to time consuming tasks. This test has so far been a success, it has pretty much single handedly taught me how to create a Power Automate flow for business tasks that would otherwise take hours to do!

Recently I was handed a project to generate reports based on data inputted into a shared MS access database, and though PowerBI would be perfect.

Having never used PowerBI before my boss gave me a crash course and left me to learn the rest alone, in the midst of trying to learn PowerBI's capabilities I explored trying to use the CoPilot extension in PowerBI, I couldn't get it to work so I rasied a support ticket with Microsoft (which in itself is the most confusing and infuriating support service I think I've ever used) only to be told on a resulting phone call that you must pay for a higher level of PowerBI in order to enable CoPilot in your workspace.

Considering CoPilot is it's own service, that you can pay for if you choose to (I would highly recommend, especially since GPT-5 was released) why has it been normalised to pay for the same service multiple times? PowerBI uses AI and Automation, so adding CoPilot to a basic PowerBI workspace wouldn't be a lot of work, I believe this has been done so Microsoft can squeeze as much as they possibly can out of businesses that decide to use Microsoft services, knowing that there really isn't an equivalent alternative in the market.

I can't see a world where this isn't reveiwed to be a pointless money grab, but then again, I am external, of course Microsoft won't see it like this and will think up of some nonsense reason why it 'must stay the way it currently is' but in the grand scheme of things, is it worth the hassle of dissatisfied customers raising support ticekts, creating complaints, generating ideas like this, wasting product support's time (And therefore Microsoft's money) just for an extra subscription to a service.

We were eventually going to have to use a Premium version of PowerBI, but this snag has made me completely rethink the way I am going to produce these reports, I don't even think I need PowerBI anymore as CoPilot has helped me with a better solution, that costs no extra than just the Premium CoPilot licence, and in the future if anymore reports need automating, I will be using the CoPilot recommendation before even thinking about going abck to PowerBI. 

I don't really like moaning about Microsoft products as they are extremely reliable, and until I dipped my feet into PowerBI, the pricing of everything seemed reasonable. But I'm not paying twice for the same thing.