Power BI Q&A Replacement, Natural Language Query in Power BI After February 2027

Power BI Q&A stops working in February 2027. Microsoft first set the retirement for December 2026 and pushed it back in September 2026. After the cutoff the Q&A visual is removed and any report that still contains one shows an error in its place. The replacement Microsoft recommends is Copilot, and Copilot only runs on paid organizational capacity, so a team that asked questions in plain English for the price of its Pro seats now needs at least an F2 Fabric capacity: $156.33 a month on a one-year reservation or $262.80 pay as you go on Azure's East US list prices. Embedded Q&A inside your own app gets no Copilot replacement at all.

This article covers the dates, what each Q&A experience maps to, what the move actually costs, and the options for the two groups Copilot does not cover. If you mainly want the Copilot license rules in detail, our Power BI Copilot license guide goes through every SKU.

When does Power BI Q&A stop working?

In February 2027. The retirement has moved once, and the two official notices disagree only on the month.

The extension is the only slack you get. Nothing about the feature is being fixed or kept in a reduced form, and the Setup tools (synonyms, linguistic relationships, teach Q&A) go at the same time, so the work you put into tuning Q&A does not carry over.

What replaces Q&A in Power BI?

Microsoft maps each retiring experience to a Copilot experience, except one.

The practical shift is not the interface, it is the bill. Q&A worked on shared capacity for anyone with a Pro license. Copilot does not: Microsoft states plainly that a Pro or Premium Per User license alone is not sufficient, because Copilot requires organizational capacity.

How much does the Q&A replacement cost?

For an organization that runs on Pro seats today, the answer is one new line item, a Fabric capacity, on top of the seats it already pays for. Microsoft's September update made this smaller than it used to be: Copilot now works on every Fabric capacity from F2, and a Fabric Copilot capacity, which bills Copilot usage from Pro and PPU workspaces to one F SKU, can also be created from F2 instead of the original P1 or F64 minimum.

Capacity prices are Azure's retail list at $0.18 per capacity unit hour pay as you go and $938 per capacity unit a year reserved, East US, read on 30 September 2026. The 432-a-day figure comes from Microsoft's published rate of about 400 capacity unit seconds for a request of 2,000 input and 500 output tokens, against the 48 capacity unit hours an F2 has in a day. Refreshes and report rendering draw on the same pool, so a busy F2 answers fewer.

Two details trip people up. Trial capacities are excluded from Copilot, so you cannot test the replacement for free; a pay-as-you-go F2 paused between sessions is the cheap way to try it. And your report authors still need Pro on any capacity. The full seat and capacity arithmetic is on our Power BI pricing page, and the Pro against Premium Per User question is covered in Power BI Pro vs Premium.

What happens to embedded Q&A?

It ends with nothing to migrate to inside Power BI. Microsoft's September post says "there are currently no plans to provide a Copilot replacement for embedded Q&A PaaS scenarios." If you are a software vendor that put a Q&A box in front of your customers on an A or F capacity, the feature disappears from your product in February 2027.

Microsoft lists three things to consider and is careful to say none is a direct replacement: moving from an embedded PaaS architecture to a supported SaaS Copilot experience, which changes who needs a license; the narrative visual and smart narrative summaries, which describe a report but do not answer new questions; and the Fabric IQ MCP Server, which is a building block for your own AI feature rather than a finished one. Whichever route you take, the capacity you already pay for keeps billing, and our Power BI Embedded pricing breakdown shows what each A and F SKU costs while you rebuild.

Who should not just switch to Copilot

Three groups need a different plan. Organizations in sovereign clouds, because Microsoft says Copilot does not yet support sovereign clouds due to GPU availability and points those customers to their account team. Embedded vendors, for the reason above. And teams whose questions were never really about a Power BI report.

That last group is bigger than it sounds. A lot of Q&A usage is people typing "orders last week by region" into a box because it was the only place they could ask anything. Copilot answers questions about the semantic model and the report in front of you. If the answer lives in a Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake or BigQuery table that nobody modeled into Power BI, Copilot cannot reach it, and buying capacity to keep a question box alive is the expensive way to solve that problem.

Power BI Q&A alternatives compared

We built AgentSQL for the last row, so weigh that accordingly. It connects read-only to the database, turns the question into SQL in your engine's dialect, runs it and returns a chart, a table and a one-line answer, with the query beside it so anyone can check it. It does not build Power BI report pages or write DAX, so if that is what you used Copilot for, keep Copilot. The Team plan at $59 a month billed yearly covers up to 10 seats and five database connections, which is less than half of an F2 reservation. You can try the console on this page on a demo database before connecting anything, and our Power BI alternatives guide compares the wider set of tools.

A migration checklist before February 2027

1. Inventory every Q&A dependency. Report pages with a Q&A visual, dashboards with the Q&A box pinned, mobile users, embedded integrations and any Q&A Setup work such as synonyms.
2. Split them by where the answer lives. Questions about a modeled report go to Copilot. Questions about raw tables go to a tool that reads the database. Questions that only needed a summary go to the narrative visual.
3. Price the capacity before you promise Copilot. Start with a pay-as-you-go F2 paused off hours, measure capacity use for two weeks, then decide between a reservation and a larger SKU.
4. Replace the visuals before the date, not after. An error in the middle of an executive report page is the version of this migration people remember.
5. Tell the users what changed. Update internal docs and help desk guidance, which Microsoft's own notice asks for, and show people where to ask their questions now.

Some teams find that what stakeholders really wanted from Q&A was the monthly summary, not a question box. If that is you, a tool that can turn a report into a presentation may cover the need more directly than any natural-language feature.

If the list from step 2 is mostly questions about raw tables, that is the case AgentSQL handles. Ask one of them in the console at the top of this page and read the SQL it writes before deciding what to buy.