Curious how Fabric Data Agent (Preview) and Copilot studio are different?

[ARUNnambiar123]

I worked on copilot studio and recently came across the preview feature of Data Agents in Fabric. I was wondering if someone could help me understand whats the key difference and wouldn't one prefer to have it in fabric as generally your entire ecosystem will reside in fabric so quick integrations.

[ARUNnambiar123]

Thanks a lot! This does help. I would definitely give data agents a go to understand the capabilities in depth. My understanding with what you stated is items like let's say "calculate sales for department "x" in 2025" are more analytical questions and Data Agent will be more apt to answer it as you probably would have your data organized as Semantic models in your environment. Whereas I've noticed Copilot studio struggles a bit with the more analytical tasks like this (have used it with SharePoint and Dataverse). I've found it to be much more reliable when it comes to navigational tasks like finding the correct PowerBI report according to what KPI I need (using a BI Catalogue as knowledge base). 

Please do correct me if I'm wrong at the assumption on copilot studio. Maybe it could be the prompts not being aptly descriptive that's hindering the calculation side of things with custom data agents inside copilot studio.

[burakkaragoz]

Thanks for sharing your experience @ARUNnambiar123 

Totally agree – for analytical use cases like querying specific metrics or navigating structured reports, Data Agent tends to be more precise and reliable.
Copilot Studio shines more when you're building broader conversational flows or integrating with external systems, but it's not always optimized for deep data analysis.

If you're experimenting with both, it might be worth documenting which types of prompts work best in each – could help others navigating the same decision.

Let me know if you want to explore any specific use case further, happy to help.

[burakkaragoz · Accepted solution]

Hi @ARUNnambiar123 ,

I've worked with both technologies and can share some key differences between Fabric Data Agent (Preview) and Copilot Studio:

Data Agent (Preview) in Fabric is specifically designed to query and analyze your data that resides within the Fabric ecosystem. It's more focused on data exploration, visualization and getting insights from your Fabric datasets. Think of it as a specialized AI assistant for your data analytics needs within Fabric.

Copilot Studio, on the other hand, is a broader development platform for creating custom copilots/chatbots that can integrate with various systems and handle a wider range of scenarios beyond just data queries. It's more about building conversational experiences that can connect to multiple data sources, not just Fabric.

The main consideration would be your use case:

• If you primarily need AI assistance for data exploration and insights within your Fabric environment, Data Agent makes sense since it's deeply integrated with Fabric's data ecosystem
• If you need to build more complex conversational experiences that might need to connect to multiple systems (including but not limited to Fabric), Copilot Studio would be better

Since you mentioned your ecosystem is primarily in Fabric, the Data Agent would probably be more straightforward to implement for data-specific tasks. But if you need broader capabilities or already have investments in Copilot Studio, you could connect it to your Fabric environment too.

Hope this helps clarify! Let me know if you have any other questions.

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