Copilot: Missing time period — should it ask or clarify?

Hi LenaKey,
Thank you for the follow-up question.

What you are seeing is expected behaviour. Even when AI Instructions tell Copilot to ask for a missing time, Copilot may still rely on the page filters, visual context, or its own interpretation of the question. This happens because AI Instructions strongly influence Copilot’s behaviour but do not guarantee that it will always ask for clarification. So, the inconsistency you are noticing is not due to anything you configured incorrectly.

At this time, there is no supported way to enforce a rule that Copilot must always ask for a date range whenever the user does not specify one. This is a current limitation of the Copilot experience in Power BI/Fabric. You can improve overall consistency by keeping AI Instructions simple, refining the AI data schema, and using Verified Answers for key business questions, but Copilot will still not behave with 100% determinism when handling missing time periods.

Hope that help. Let us know if you have any doubts regarding this. We will be happy to help.

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