Copilot on Non-Fabric Items

[jamesholland198]

Hi,

Trying to understand the minefield that is Fabric licensing, CUs etc.

My organisation wants to enable Copilot, mainly for report viewers to be able to ask questions of the data, or for Copilot to analyse a report/dataset and provide a summary.

All users currently have Pro licenses (approx 100)

I understand we need at least a Fabric F2 licence to enable Copilot.  Question is, can we (including the 100 Pro user viewers) use Copilot on semantic models without using any of the Fabric items (lakehouses etc) and so not consume any CUs and so get away with using the lowest F2 SKU, with no threat of additional overusage charges etc?

Thanks,

[cengizhanarslan]

Copilot does consume Fabric capacity, even when used only against Power BI semantic models and reports.

• Runs analysis queries against the semantic model

• Uses Fabric capacity (CUs) to execute those operations

• Does not require Lakehouses, Warehouses, or other Fabric items, but capacity is still used

[v-menakakota]

Hi @jamesholland198 
Thanks for reaching out to the Microsoft fabric community forum. 

I would also take a moment to thank  @pallavi_r  and @cengizhanarslan  , for actively participating in the community forum and for the solutions you’ve been sharing in the community forum. Your contributions make a real difference.

I hope the above details help you fix the issue. If you still have any questions or need more help, feel free to reach out. We’re always here to support you 

Best Regards, 
Community Support Team  

[pallavi_r · Accepted solution]

Hi @jamesholland198 

Yes, you can use Copilot only with Power BI reports and semantic models only and without using Lakehouses, Pipelines, or other Fabric items.

But CU consumption cannot be avoided. Copilot itself uses Fabric compute.
Please check the below link on Copilot which gives idea on no of words, tokens and consumption rate.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/fundamentals/copilot-fabric-consumption

With F2, we can enable copilot, but for ~100 Pro users it seems a low capacity and might get throttled when there is active usage of Copilot.

There wont be hidden charges. Only, performance will be an issue and it would slow down, throttle when capacity is exhausted.

If this post helps, please accept this as a solution. Appreciate your kudos.

Thanks,

Pallavi_r