Connect Power BI

Every user — both owners and regular users — connects their own Power BI account. This gives Power BI Agent access to the workspaces and datasets your Microsoft account has access to.

Requirements

Before you can connect Power BI, a few things need to be in place. Some you can arrange yourself; others have to be enabled for you by your Power BI or Microsoft Fabric tenant administrator.

1. Tenant settings (by the Power BI admin)

Ask your Power BI or Fabric tenant administrator to enable the following option in the Power BI admin portal under Tenant settings — preferably scoped to a security group you belong to, or otherwise to the entire organization:

• Semantic Model Execute Queries REST API — Power BI Agent uses this API to run DAX queries against your semantic model. Without this setting every question returns a 401/403 error, even though the initial connection itself succeeds.

Enabling a tenant setting can take up to 15 minutes to take effect.

2. Workspace role

For every workspace whose dataset you use, the user needs at least the Viewer role. The role is managed by the workspace owner in Workspace → Access in Power BI.

With Viewer the user also needs Build permission on the semantic model. Grant it via a published App with "Allow people to build content with the datasets in this app audience" or directly on the semantic model.

With Contributor or higher Build permission is automatically granted.

With Row-Level Security (RLS): only the Viewer role respects RLS filters. From Contributor upwards RLS filters are bypassed and the user sees all data. For RLS to apply you therefore need the combination Viewer + Build permission, plus membership of an RLS role on the dataset.

3. Other requirements

• A Power BI account with a Pro or Premium Per User license (or a workspace on Premium/Fabric capacity).
• At least one published semantic model in the workspace.

Connect your account

1. Go to Power BI in the portal.
2. Click Connect Power BI Account — you will be redirected to Microsoft to grant access.
3. Sign in with your Microsoft account and approve the permissions.
4. After authorization, you will be returned to the portal and your account is connected.

Power BI Agent requests access to your workspaces and semantic models. Executing DAX queries requires write access to the semantic model — no data in Power BI is ever modified.

Datasets

After connecting your Power BI account, you can see the datasets assigned to you under Power BI. The organization owner manages which datasets are available and who has access.

Next step

Go to Add datasets to set up your first dataset.