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Power BI Copilot, AI Instructions And Visualisation Guidelines

If there are specific ways you want your data to be visualised by Power BI Copilot then you have two options. You can use Verified Answers to link questions to visuals on your reports and can even set them up so users can apply filters to these visuals in their prompts. Alternatively – and this is the topic of this post – you can use AI Instructions to tell Copilot which visuals should be used when certain combinations of measures and columns appear together in a prompt.

Using the same semantic model I have used in this series of posts, consider the following prompts and the responses returned when there are no AI Instructions:

show count of transactions by date for the first week of January 2025

This returns results as a line chart:

show count of transactions broken down by New

[There is a column in the model called New containing Y or N values]

This returns results as a bar chart:

Adding the following AI Instructions changes the visualisations used by Copilot for these prompts:

When showing the count of transactions measure by date always use a column chart.
When showing the count of transactions measure by New use a pie chart.

Here are the responses returned now:

show count of transactions by date for the first week of January 2025

show count of transactions broken down by New

Before someone comments, I’m not saying that these visualisation choices are better than the defaults, I’m just saying that you can use AI Instructions to change the visuals used in responses. There may be a type of analysis for your data or your industry that should always use a certain Power BI visual, one that isn’t the visual that Copilot chooses by default. And we all know that some users have strong opinions on which visuals should be used that don’t follow data visualisation best practices…