A Power BI Copilot alternative: when it makes sense
Power BI Copilot answers questions over semantic models already published in Power BI, requires Fabric F2 or Premium P1 capacity and, according to Microsoft, officially supports only English for data questions. An alternative makes sense when you have no such model ready, need to ask in another language, or want to query the ERP database directly.
What Power BI Copilot requires
Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant inside Power BI. It summarizes reports, helps authors build pages and write DAX, and answers questions about the data. If your team already lives in Power BI, it is the obvious place to start. Before you count on it, check what the official documentation asks for (reviewed on October 16, 2026):
- Paid capacity. Copilot requires a paid Fabric capacity of F2 or higher, or Power BI Premium P1 or higher. Trial capacities and free SKUs are not supported, and a Pro or Premium Per User license alone is not enough.
- A semantic model. For data questions, Copilot uses the Power BI semantic model. Q&A has to be enabled on the model, because Copilot uses the same engine to build its queries.
- Data preparation. Microsoft recommends preparing the model for AI (schema, instructions and verified answers) and warns that without it Copilot can misread the data and return generic or inaccurate results.
- An admin setting. Copilot is on by default, but it depends on a tenant setting in the Fabric admin portal that your admin can turn off.
Copilot is designed to speed up teams whose data is already modeled in Power BI. If yours is not, building that model comes first.
The language question
For teams that do not work in English, this is the point that matters most. Microsoft's page on Copilot data questions states that English is the only supported language. The Copilot overview adds that prompts in other languages might occasionally return relevant responses, but that multilingual use is not officially supported at this time.
In practice, a Brazilian sales director who asks in Portuguese may still get an answer. Microsoft just does not stand behind it, and the business vocabulary in that language is left to whoever prepares the model.
Power BI model or ERP database: where the approaches split
The basic difference between Copilot and a conversational BI tool like Entendo is where the question gets answered.
Copilot works on top of the Power BI semantic model and generates DAX, the query language for those models. If the company has invested in well-built models with the right measures and relationships, Copilot puts that work to use. If it has not, the question has nowhere to land.
Entendo connects directly to the database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Firebird or ClickHouse, usually the ERP database) and generates SQL. Business rules live in its own semantic layer, with a glossary, targets and KPIs, built during assisted onboarding. The SQL and the reasoning show up in every answer so they can be checked.
They also differ in what they answer. Microsoft says Copilot cannot yet handle questions that call for forecasting, anomaly detection or key influencers. Entendo produces time-series forecasts from historical data.
| Copilot in Power BI | Entendo | |
|---|---|---|
| What it answers over | Semantic models published in Power BI | The database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Firebird, ClickHouse), plus Google Sheets, CSV and Excel |
| Query it generates | DAX, which can be checked in the answer | SQL, shown in every answer along with the reasoning |
| Officially supported language for data questions | English | Portuguese and English |
| What you need to use it | Paid Fabric F2+ or Premium P1+ capacity; trials not supported | Monthly plan on request and assisted onboarding, billed separately |
| Forecasting | Does not yet answer forecasting questions | Time-series forecasting |
| Resale under a partner's brand | Not what the product is built for | White-label: the partner's logo, colors, domain, emails and exports |
Copilot sources: Microsoft's official documentation, Copilot for Power BI overview, Ask data questions with Copilot and Prepare your data for AI, reviewed on October 16, 2026. Entendo is not a Microsoft product or partner. Power BI and Copilot are trademarks of Microsoft.
When Copilot is the right call
Stick with Copilot when:
- the company already has Fabric or Premium capacity and semantic models published and maintained by a BI team;
- users work in English;
- questions revolve around existing reports, and the main win is summarizing and exploring them;
- the BI team wants help writing DAX and building report pages.
In that setup, switching tools would throw away the investment in the model.
When an alternative makes more sense
An alternative like Entendo fits better when:
- the data sits in the ERP database and the company does not have, and does not want to build right now, semantic models in Power BI;
- the people asking work in Portuguese and need support in that language;
- the company wants to check the SQL that runs on its own database, not a query against a modeled copy;
- the database lives inside the company network and the connection has to be outbound, with no inbound port opened (Entendo Gateway handles that);
- the company is a software house or consultancy that wants to offer conversational BI to its clients under its own brand, through the white-label model.
You can run both
Power BI dashboards can keep handling routine tracking while conversational BI takes the questions no dashboard covers. Entendo reads the database in read-only mode and leaves existing reports untouched.
For more on the category, see what conversational BI is and how querying a database in natural language works.