Power BI vs Tableau: AI features compared

Create, update, and manage tables, columns, measures, and relationships by using natural language

Tableau Agent performs the steps for you, building out your flow and adding the changes to the Changes pane.

Copilot can't currently answer questions that require generating new insights, such as anomaly detection, forecasting, or finding key influencers.

Shows values for dimension members that changed the most in the same direction as the observed change in the metric.

This question asks for forecasting, which isn't currently supported.

Shows the expected values for a metric for the remainder of the period, along with a forecast confidence range.

Check the last refresh time - see when the data was last updated at the top of the dashboard.

App-scoped Copilot supports verified answers prepared by app authors.

You can create permission sets or profiles to control which users can access your new Analytics and Visualization agent.

Inspector: Proactive Alerts: Includes the Data Alert Management subagent

Visual bindings that map fields to visual roles such as Category, Values, Legend, and Tooltips

For example, suppose you want to use a query variable to find the Sample_Superstore workbook.

The guide covers the current supported creation experience, including using the data app template, connecting to your semantic model, and telling Copilot what you want it to create.

It enables coding agents to create custom web apps for exploring and presenting data, removing many of the authoring, visualization, and analytical limitations Power BI authors traditionally work around.

Agent skills — Folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that an agent loads on demand to follow Power BI authoring best practices.

Source control ready - Open text files, designed for seamless integration with Git, enabling version history and team collaboration.

File formats: Supported file types are text files (.txt) and Markdown files (.md).

Matched trigger phrase: Displays the specific phrase that Copilot matched, whether it's exact or semantically similar.

- Descriptions: Descriptions set on tables and columns to provide more context about the data. Copilot uses descriptions only in Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) queries and search capabilities.

The information it indexes includes field metadata such as field captions, field descriptions from comments(first 150 characters) in Tableau Desktop or from Tableau Catalog, data roles, and data types.

Ask a data question by using a field that isn't in the AI data schema. Copilot shouldn't return an answer.

Hide fields you don’t need and Tableau Agent won’t use these hidden fields.

Power BI supports only the following third-party semantic models:

dbt Semantic Layer

Admins need to be aware of four main settings related to Copilot:

Ensure the model version assigned to the deployment is supported by Tableau Server.

Now, when the user asks for sales by area, Copilot returns the verified answer that the model author approves.

Feedback further personalizes insights. Users can provide thumbs-up or thumbs-down feedback on the insights they see to indicate whether the insights are useful. The Insights platform learns from this to further personalize the types of insights it shows to a user.

The time in seconds it took to load or query the visual

Row-level security (RLS) and object-level security (OLS) aren't fully supported as security features for verified answers.

The data a user has access to while using Tableau Agent conforms to any row or column-level security policies that you have in place.

This summary is generated by sending a semantic query result back to Azure OpenAI (which includes data points) and requesting a natural language explanation.

Due to our zero data retention policies in place with our third-party LLM providers, any data sent to the LLM isn’t retained and is deleted after a response is sent back.

As you interact with Tableau Agent, neither your data nor your conversations that are sent to the Large Language Model (LLM) are saved to the LLM, and no customer data is ever used to train the model.

When you authenticate with a service principal (described next), the user ID captured by the activity log is the Application ID.

- Work in PBIP files under Git. Power BI Project (PBIP) files store your model as plain text, so Git tracks every change the agent makes. You get a diff to review before you commit, and a way to revert if the result isn't what you wanted.

It may be possible to identify what changed to break a custom view by comparing a .twb from before and after the change.