Power BI Q&A Stops Working in February 2027. Find Your Reports Now

A small Power BI feature with a firm end date

Q&A is the box in Power BI where someone types a plain question, like sales by region last quarter, and gets a chart back. Report builders add it as a visual or a button. It also shows up as a question box on dashboards and as a virtual analyst in the Power BI phone app.

Microsoft announced in December 2025 that Q&A would be retired. Its first date was December 2026. In a newer post on the Microsoft Fabric blog, the Power BI team moved the date to February 2027 to give companies more time.

Microsoft says the reason is overlap. Copilot now answers plain English questions with generative AI, and Microsoft wants one way to do that instead of two. When it first announced the change, Microsoft said it was still reviewing what to offer people on Pro licenses.

That sounds far off. It is about three months away, and the last weeks of the year are when most teams are short on time.

What happens when Q&A retires

Microsoft says that beginning in February 2027, Q&A will no longer work in Power BI. The Q&A visual will be removed. Existing reports that contain a Q&A visual will show an error where the visual used to be.

The retirement covers more than the visual. It includes Q&A on dashboards, the virtual analyst in the mobile app and Q&A built into custom apps through Power BI embedded analytics. It also includes Q&A Setup, the tools report builders use to teach Q&A synonyms, linguistic relationships, row labels and suggested questions.

The Microsoft 365 message center notice, MC1218421, published January 16, 2026, gives the same list. It tells admins to review reports for Q&A visuals, learn the replacements and update internal help guides.

What Microsoft offers in its place

Microsoft points people to Copilot for each retiring piece. Q&A in reports maps to Copilot with Power BI reports. Q&A on dashboards maps to the standalone Copilot experience. The mobile virtual analyst maps to Copilot in Power BI Mobile. Q&A Setup maps to a tool called Prep Data for AI.

The catch is licensing. Microsoft Learn says Copilot for Power BI needs a workspace on Power BI Premium capacity, P1 or higher, or a paid Fabric capacity, F2 or higher. A Fabric Copilot capacity is another option. Copilot is not supported on trial capacities, and it is not currently supported in Private Link or closed network setups.

In its February 2027 update, Microsoft said Copilot is now available on all Fabric capacities starting at F2. It also said a Fabric Copilot capacity can now be created on F2 and higher, and it can cover users in Pro and Premium Per User workspaces. Microsoft says that capacity is billed only for Copilot use, while the queries Copilot runs are charged to the capacity that holds the data.

For companies that only pay for Power BI Pro, that is the real question. When a reader asked about this in the comments on that post, a Microsoft employee replied that there are no current plans for a Copilot alternative to Q&A, and that F2 is the lower cost way in.

Copilot also comes with settings your admin should look at first. Microsoft Learn says Copilot is turned on by default in the Fabric admin portal, and the standalone Copilot experience has been on by default since September 2025 for tenants where Copilot is already on. There is a setting that limits standalone Copilot to content marked as approved. If your data models have messy names or old tables, fix that before people start asking Copilot questions about them.

Two groups with a harder road

If you built Q&A into your own app or customer portal with Power BI Embedded, Microsoft says there are no current plans for a Copilot replacement for those embedded scenarios. It lists narrative visuals, smart narrative summaries and a Fabric IQ MCP Server as options to consider, while saying none of them is a direct replacement.

If your tenant runs in one of Microsoft's sovereign clouds, Microsoft says Copilot does not support those clouds yet because of GPU availability. It tells those customers to talk with their Microsoft account team about options.

There is some good news in the comments too. Some report builders turn on Q&A just to put dynamic values in text boxes. A Microsoft employee said that will keep working, and that Microsoft is changing it so it no longer needs Q&A. Another said a new setting is coming to replace the Enable Q&A switch some teams use to decide which data models Copilot can see.

How to get ready before February

1. 1Ask your Power BI admin to list every report and dashboard that has a Q&A visual, a Q&A button or a dashboard question box.
2. 2Add any custom apps or portals that use embedded Q&A, and anything in the mobile app that people rely on.
3. 3Write down who uses each one and what question they usually ask. Many Q&A visuals answer the same few questions every week.
4. 4For simple, repeat questions, build a normal chart or a small report page. That costs nothing extra and does not break.
5. 5If people truly need to ask new questions in plain English, price out an F2 Fabric capacity or a Fabric Copilot capacity and test Copilot on a paid capacity, since trials are not supported.
6. 6Check that your data models have clear table and column names before you turn on Copilot. Prep Data for AI is the tool Microsoft points to for this.
7. 7Replace or remove each Q&A visual, then tell report users what changed and where to find the new version.
8. 8Finish before the end of January 2027 so the error never reaches a live report.

What this means if you run a company in Oklahoma

A lot of Oklahoma companies use Power BI on Pro licenses only. Oil and gas firms, clinics, school districts, manufacturers and county offices often have a handful of reports that one person built years ago. If one of those reports has a Q&A box, it will break in February, and the person who built it may not work there anymore.

For most of these companies, the right answer is not buying a new capacity. It is finding the few questions people ask, building plain visuals for them and turning off what nobody uses. Copilot may be worth it for some teams, but that should be a choice and not a reaction to an error message.

At Oklahoma Data Partners, we work only with data and only in Oklahoma. We help Oklahoma companies find what is in their Power BI tenant, rebuild reports that depend on retiring features and decide when Copilot is worth the cost. If you want help getting your reports ready before February, book a consultation.