Unloq and Power BI with Copilot compared

How do Unloq and Power BI with Copilot compare?

Both answer plain-English questions about your data, and both can show how they reached an answer. Microsoft’s own pages call the assistant both Copilot in Power BI and Copilot for Power BI.

When is Power BI with Copilot the better choice?

Power BI with Copilot is the better choice for reporting and quick answers inside the Microsoft tools you already run. In these cases we would tell you to stay with what you have.

• You would rather not add a supplier. Copilot and the data agent come from Microsoft and work inside the permissions you manage.

• The change you need explained is on one chart. Power BI ranks what contributed, and anomaly detection explains anomalies on a line chart, with nothing to build.

• You want monitoring that acts. The operations agent asks for approval in Teams, and Activator turns data streams “into automated actions”.

• You want budgets and forecasts beside your reports. Fabric planning handles both, and Microsoft says it extends Fabric “beyond analytics into enterprise decision intelligence”, words we use too, for a different job.

• Your security review asks for ISO 27001 or ISO 42001. Microsoft lists both for Microsoft Copilot; Unloq is Cyber Essentials Plus certified.

• One well-prepared model answers what you ask. What does decision intelligence add to Copilot or ChatGPT? covers that case and the others where we would say not to buy.

When is Unloq the better choice?

Choose Unloq when a number has moved and a leadership team has to decide what to do about it. Businesses already on Microsoft ask us what Unloq adds. If a sales figure fell last month, Unloq ranks the drivers by their share of the fall, reading the numbers and documents together and citing the exact document and page. Options come ranked best first, with odds checked against your own history, and where history is thin Unloq says so and gives no number. A person signs off, Unloq records the outcome they expected, and months later Unloq measures what the decision added against a baseline agreed before acting.

Can you use Power BI, Copilot and Unloq together?

Yes, and if you already pay for Microsoft 365 and Power BI, that is the setup we would suggest. Your teams keep Copilot and Power BI for the drafting and reporting they rely on now, and Unloq takes the recurring decisions with money attached.

Unloq connects read-only to the systems you approve and rebuilds no pipeline or warehouse first, so your Microsoft setup stays as it is. If you run on Azure, Unloq can run inside your own Azure tenancy.

Take a monthly trading review. The Power BI dashboard shows gross margin down in one region, and Copilot drafts the summary for the meeting pack. Before the meeting, Unloq has already told the region’s owner the number was slipping, ranked what drove the fall and put options to the leadership team, each with its evidence and odds. Someone approves one, and a later review shows what it added.

Microsoft’s operations agent shares a principle with Unloq: a person approves the recommendation first. Once a recipient approves, Microsoft says, “the agent runs the action on behalf of the creator”, and for an operational trigger that makes sense to us. For a leadership call, Unloq also records the outcome the approver expected, so the result can be measured against it.

Some questions start as a report and turn into a decision halfway through the meeting, and we have no neat rule for where Power BI’s job ends and Unloq’s begins.