Power BI Q&A Retirement: What Breaks and What Replaces It

Navy Solv Systems title card reading 'Power BI Q&A Is Retiring' with a broadcast signal motif.

In Short: Power BI Q&A Retirement Lands in February 2027

Microsoft is retiring Power BI Q&A, the natural-language question box that has sat in reports, dashboards and the mobile app for years. The Power BI Q&A retirement was first set for December 2026. On 10 September 2026 Microsoft moved it to February 2027. From then, Q&A no longer works anywhere in Power BI. The Q&A visual is removed, and existing reports that contain one show an error where the visual used to be.

The replacement is Copilot. For most surfaces that is a reasonable swap, with one licensing catch and one real gap: embedded Q&A has no Copilot equivalent. This post covers what breaks, what to move to, and how to find your exposure before your users find it for you.

What Is Retiring

The retirement covers both the Q&A experiences people use and the setup tools authors used to tune them. Microsoft's September post lists five items and a recommended alternative for each:

Q&A in reports (the Q&A visual and Q&A button): move to Copilot with Power BI reports, the report pane on the right of a report
Q&A on a dashboard: move to the standalone Copilot experience, the full-screen chat in the left navigation
Q&A virtual analyst in the mobile app: move to Copilot in Power BI Mobile
Q&A in Power BI embedded analytics: Copilot for SaaS scenarios where you can use them; for embedded PaaS, see below
Q&A Setup (synonyms, linguistic relationships, row labels, teach Q&A, suggested questions): move to Prep data for AI

There is already a knock-on change. In September Microsoft replaced the Q&A-based way of creating dynamic values in the narrative visual and text box with a direct picker: choose a column or measure, a summarisation and filters. Values authored with Q&A before that stay, but read-only. If your reports rely on narrative text, check them now rather than in February.

The Licensing Catch, and the F2 Change

Q&A worked on a Power BI Pro licence. Copilot does not. Microsoft's Copilot overview is explicit: a Pro or Premium Per User licence alone is not enough, and you need a paid Fabric capacity (F2 or higher) or Power BI Premium (P1 or higher). Trial capacities and free SKUs are not supported, and nor are sovereign clouds.

The December 2025 announcement left Pro customers waiting on an answer. The September update gave one:

Copilot is now available on every Fabric capacity from F2. It used to need F64 or above, which is why so many mid-sized organisations never switched it on.
Fabric Copilot Capacity (FCC) can now be created on F2 and higher, down from P1/F64. FCC is an optional way to bill all Copilot usage, including from users working in Pro and PPU workspaces, to one central capacity.

So a Pro-only organisation can now get Copilot by adding a small Fabric capacity rather than buying F64. That is a genuine change, but it is still a new bill. Copilot consumes capacity units like any other workload, and our guide to what Copilot in Fabric costs explains how to estimate that. For how capacity fits alongside per-user licences, see Power BI licensing in 2026.

The Gap: Embedded Q&A

This is the part that needs the most attention. In December 2025 Microsoft said Copilot support for embedded PaaS scenarios would arrive "in the coming months". The September 2026 post says the opposite: there are currently no plans to provide a Copilot replacement for embedded Q&A PaaS scenarios.

If you embed Power BI in your own application with the app-owns-data pattern and expose a Q&A box to customers, that feature will stop working in February 2027 and nothing will replace it like for like. Microsoft suggests three directions, none of them a drop-in:

Copilot for SaaS embedding, if you can move from app-owns-data to a user-owns-data model where your users sign in with their own organisational accounts
The narrative visual and smart narrative summaries, which give written insight but not free-form questions
The Fabric IQ MCP Server, which lets you build your own conversational layer against the model

For an ISV with external customers, the third option is usually the realistic one, and it is a build project, not a setting. Start scoping it this quarter. Sovereign cloud customers are in a similar position: Copilot does not yet support sovereign clouds, and Microsoft's advice is to contact your account team.

How to Find Your Q&A Dependencies

Most organisations do not know where Q&A is in use. Microsoft's own checklist starts with an inventory, and so do we:

Ask the tool. The Q&A Review questions page lists semantic models in your tenant with the questions users have asked over the last 28 days. That tells you which models people actually query, not just where a visual was dropped years ago.
Search the reports. Look for Q&A visuals and Q&A buttons in reports, and for Q&A boxes on dashboards. Reports stored as PBIP files under source control are far easier to search than a folder of PBIX files.
Check the apps you build. Any embedded solution calling Q&A needs a named owner and a plan.
Check mobile. Field teams who use the mobile virtual analyst will notice first.
List Q&A Setup work. Models with heavy synonym and phrasing work hold business vocabulary worth carrying over.

Then sort each item: remove (nobody uses it), replace with Copilot (needs capacity), or rebuild (embedded).

Moving the Setup Work to Prep Data for AI

Q&A only ever understood your model as well as its metadata, and Copilot is the same. We explain the mechanics in how natural language becomes DAX. Microsoft's replacement for Q&A Setup is Prep data for AI, which is in preview and offers three tools, all saved on the semantic model:

AI data schemas, to choose which fields Copilot should consider
Verified answers, which tie trigger phrases to a specific visual so common questions get a consistent answer
AI instructions, plain-language business context and rules

You can also mark a model Approved for Copilot, which removes the friction warnings the standalone Copilot shows for unapproved content. Our guide to preparing a semantic model for Copilot walks through how we do this on client models.

One caution. Microsoft has said Q&A and Copilot will be separated, but the Prep data for AI page currently still lists "You must enable Power BI Q&A on your semantic model" as a requirement. Until Microsoft confirms otherwise, do not switch Q&A off on models that Copilot uses. Remove the Q&A visuals, not the setting.

A Plan That Beats February

October to November 2026: build the inventory, retire unused Q&A visuals, and decide on capacity if you are Pro-only.
December 2026: prepare your two or three most-used models with Prep data for AI and test Copilot with real users.
January 2027: replace remaining Q&A visuals and dashboard boxes, brief mobile users, and finish the embedded design.
February 2027: Q&A stops. Nothing visible should break.

If you are rolling out Copilot more widely at the same time, our overview of Copilot in Power BI covers what it does well and where it still falls short.

Where Solv Systems Comes In

This is a short project if you start now: inventory, capacity decision, model preparation and swap-out, plus a design for anything embedded. Our Power BI consulting team can run it end to end, so February 2027 passes without anyone noticing.

Sources and Further Reading

Frequently asked

Microsoft's current date is February 2027. The original December 2025 announcement said December 2026; a September 2026 post moved it to February 2027 to give customers more time. From then, Q&A no longer works in Power BI and the Q&A visual is removed.

Microsoft says existing reports that contain Q&A visuals will display an error in place of the visual. The report itself still opens, but the Q&A tile becomes a broken box, so remove or replace those visuals before February 2027.

Copilot. Microsoft maps Q&A in reports to the Copilot report pane, dashboard Q&A to the standalone Copilot experience, mobile Q&A to Copilot in Power BI Mobile, and Q&A Setup to Prep data for AI. Embedded PaaS scenarios have no direct replacement.

Not with a Pro licence alone. Copilot needs a paid Fabric capacity (F2 or higher) or Power BI Premium (P1 or higher). Microsoft now allows Copilot on every Fabric capacity from F2, and Fabric Copilot Capacity can be created on F2 and above, which gives Pro-based organisations a smaller entry point.

Not a direct one. Microsoft says there are currently no plans for a Copilot replacement for embedded Q&A in PaaS (app owns data) scenarios. It suggests Copilot for SaaS embedding where you can move to it, the narrative visual and smart narrative summaries, or the Fabric IQ MCP Server.

Prep data for AI is Microsoft's replacement for Q&A Setup, using AI data schemas, verified answers and AI instructions saved to the semantic model. Microsoft's Prep data for AI page still lists enabling Q&A on the model as a requirement, so do not switch Q&A off on models Copilot uses until Microsoft confirms the separation is complete.