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Stopping Power BI Copilot From Answering Questions From Report Visuals

When you ask Power BI Copilot a data question, the first thing it will do is try to answer that question using information from report visuals; if it can’t find the answer on a report page it will then go on try to build a new visual or generate a DAX query. Most of the time you’ll find that answering the question from data already displayed on a report is the method that is most likely to give you the correct answer, but occasionally – depending on the report, the measure and the filters applied to the visual – it can result in incorrect answers. In those situations you can use AI Instructions to influence how Power BI Copilot answers questions.

Consider the following report built on the semantic model I have used for most of my recent posts on Copilot containing real estate price data from the UK Land Registry:

There are two measures displayed in the visuals here: Count Of Transactions and Average Price Paid. Asking questions whose answers are clearly displayed on the page such as:

What is the Count Of Transactions?
What is the Average Price Paid for Flats?

…means that Copilot gets those answers from the report, as you would expect:

You can tell that the question has been answered from a report visual by the presence of Citations (underlined in red in the screenshot above) in the answers which point back to the visual used.

In this case the answers are both correct but let’s pretend that the answer to the question about the Average Price Paid for Flats is not and you want Copilot to bypass the bar chart visual when generating its answer. In this case you can use an AI Instruction like this:

If a user asks a question about the Average Price Paid measure, ignore any visuals on report pages and do not use them to answer the question because they may give a misleading answer. Instead, always generate a new visual to answer the question.

After applying these AI Instructions, the question:

What is the Average Price Paid for Flats?

…is now answered with a new card visual:

In this case Copilot has now ignored the visual on the page containing the answer and instead gone to the semantic model.

While this is a useful trick to know, if you find Copilot is not giving you the results you expect when it answers questions using report content it’s much better to try to understand why that’s happening and tune your report appropriately before trying to bypass the report altogether. How you do that is a topic I will address in a future post.

[Thanks to Celia Bayliss for the information in this post]