Power BI May 2025 Feature Summary

Events & Announcements

New Fabric Roadmap tool

We’ve heard from you that it’s critical to know when key Power BI features will land, especially those that directly impact your use cases or unblock your organization’s adoption. For example, if you’re waiting on Translytical Task Flows to be able to update data from a Power BI report, you need a clear view of when that capability is planned and when it becomes available.

Until now, this information was spread across Release Plan documentation pages. Today, we’re making that experience better. The new Roadmap page brings it all together in one place, with a cleaner interface, real-time updates, and direct integration with the internal planning tool used by the Power BI team. Check it out at https://roadmap.fabric.microsoft.com and tell us what you think in the comments.

General

Power BI Desktop 32-bit Build Deprecation Update

As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance the performance and security of Power BI, we are announcing the deprecation of the 32-bit build of Power BI Desktop. Starting in August 2025, we will no longer provide 32-bit builds for Power BI Desktop.

Key points:

• Deprecation timeline: The 32-bit build will be deprecated in the August 2025 release. Customers using the 32-bit build are encouraged to transition to the 64-bit build to continue receiving updates and support.
• Benefits of transitioning to 64-bit: The 64-bit build provides enhanced performance, better security, and support for the latest features and improvements in Power BI Desktop.

We recommend all users to make the switch to the 64-bit build to take full advantage of these benefits. For more detailed information and guidance on transitioning, please refer to the documentation.

Copilot and AI

Standalone Copilot in Power BI: Ask Anything! (Preview)

Introducing the new standalone Copilot in Power BI! This full-page Copilot experience allows users to find and analyze any reports, semantic models, apps, and data agents they have access to. Unlike the Copilot pane, which only lets you ask questions about the report you currently have opened, the standalone Copilot Pane lets you ask questions about any data you have access to and will find the right item to provide you with an answer. It will respect all existing permissions, including RLS!  This experience will be available in Power BI Service in the upcoming weeks.

Capabilities:

• Search – Ask Copilot to find reports, semantic models, apps, and data agents that you have access to. We’ll return a hyperlinked list of relevant items, with helpful details to make it easy for you to find the right thing.

Ask questions about your data – Copilot can answer questions and create visuals using the measures and other data fields in your model— it can also create new DAX calculations. To learn more, refer to the documentation. You can link a report or model to your question, with app functionality coming soon.

Or you can just send your question on its own and let Copilot find the right data for you!

Alternatively, simply type your question and Copilot will locate the relevant data for you effortlessly! Simply choose one of the suggested report buttons at the bottom of the screen, and we’ll generate the answer based on your selection.

Get summaries about an entire report or a specific topic within that report. Ask things like ‘Summarize the relationship between weather and visits to Hawaii’ or ‘Summarize trends in sales last year’. Keep in mind, at this time, you can only get summaries about reports, not models. For more information, refer to the documentation.

Attach Fabric data agents and get answers without leaving Power BI Copilot (think of these as experts in a specific topic, customized and trained by authors).

To learn more, refer to the documentation.

Things to consider

• Turn on the tenant setting – To try it out, admins need to enable Copilot in Power BI, additionally enable the following new tenant setting: Users can access a standalone, cross-item Power BI Copilot experience.
  • To learn more, refer to the documentation.
• Prep your data for good results – You must prepare your data for it to work well with Copilot! Read on to learn what that entails.
  • To learn more, refer to the documentation.
• Mark your data as prepped – Semantic model authors will have the ability to mark a semantic model as prepped in model settings. This impacts the appearance of ‘Needs AI prep’ warnings.
  • To learn more, refer to the documentation.
• Warnings on unprepped data – Models that aren’t marked as prepped will be accompanied by warnings that the answer quality could be low. At the beginning of the preview, you’ll only see a warning experience on answers.
  • Coming soon: Warning labels will start showing up on items in search responses in a few weeks!
  • To learn more, refer to the documentation.
• Admins can hide unprepped data (coming soon) – Capacity admins will have the ability to hide data that hasn’t been marked as prepped by authors. This admin setting will be available in just a few weeks.

To learn more, refer to the documentation. These features will be available to all users in Power BI Desktop and will be rolled out to the Service in next upcoming weeks.