Sunday, March 1, 2026

Analyze Copilot Credit Use in PowerBI

Build a Multi-Environment Copilot Credits Dashboard in Power BI



If you’re managing AI workloads across the Power Platform—AI Builder, Copilot Studio agents, Power Apps, or Power Automate—you’ve probably asked the same question many teams are asking today: where are all these credits going?

It’s a fair question (driven by customer interest). Copilot Credits are the universal currency for AI consumption across Microsoft’s ecosystem, and as adoption grows, visibility becomes essential. Not just for cost management, but for understanding which environments, models, and workloads are actually driving usage.

Summary: Managing Copilot Credits Across Power Platform with Power BI

As AI adoption accelerates across the Microsoft ecosystem, Copilot Credits have become the universal currency for AI consumption across Power Platform, AI Builder, Copilot Studio agents, Power Apps, and Power Automate. A fair and increasingly common question is: where are our Copilot Credits actually going?

Microsoft provides essential guidance and reporting through the Power Platform Admin Center, AI Builder consumption reports, and Copilot Studio capacity views. These tools establish licensing rules, capacity limits, and governance guardrails. However, once organizations operate across multiple Power Platform environments—Dev, Test, Production, regional, or business‑unit‑specific—credit consumption becomes fragmented. Usage data lives inside Dataverse tables in each environment, making it difficult to understand trends, compare environments, or explain spend to finance and leadership.

To address this gap, this project introduces a practical Power BI dashboard that aggregates Copilot Credit consumption across multiple Power Platform environments into a single, consolidated view. It is not a commercial reporting solution and does not replace Microsoft’s official reports. Instead, it provides operational visibility into how credits are actually consumed over time.

What the Dashboard Does

The Power BI dashboard connects to multiple Dataverse environments using parameterized Power Query functions, aggregates AI consumption events into combined tables, and tags each record with its source environment. It extracts Copilot Credit usage from JSON payloads stored in the msdyn_eventdata field, enabling credit consumption to be summed, filtered, and visualized like any other metric.

Key capabilities include:

  • Multi‑environment aggregation into a single dataset
  • Consumption breakdown by source (Copilot Studio agents, APIs, Power Apps, Power Automate)
  • AI model drill‑down to identify which AI Builder or generative AI functions drive usage
  • Time‑based analysis with proper date intelligence for month‑over‑month trends and running totals
  • Cost and capacity tracking using gauges and KPI cards
  • Interactive filtering by environment, AI source, model, and date range

The dashboard is organized into three pages:

  1. Executive Summary – high‑level KPIs, trends, and top consumers for leadership and finance
  2. Consumption Analysis – detailed matrices and decomposition trees for technical teams
  3. Cost & Capacity – budget tracking, running totals, and monthly breakdowns




Technical Highlights

Building a multi‑environment model required addressing several common Dataverse challenges:

  • Composite keys were introduced to avoid duplicate ID conflicts across environments (for example, combining msdyn_aimodelid with EnvironmentName)
  • JSON parsing logic extracts Copilot Credit values from event payloads
  • Date normalization converts text‑based processing timestamps into proper date fields for time intelligence
  • Centralized data model supports clean relationships and accurate aggregation

Licensing Context: AI Builder Credits Transition

In October 2025, Microsoft announced the progressive end of AI Builder credits, with Copilot Credits becoming the long‑term consumption model for AI workloads. Key milestones include:

End of AI Builder credits | Microsoft Learn

  • November 1, 2025: New customers can no longer purchase AI Builder capacity add‑ons
  • November 1, 2026: Seeded AI Builder credits are removed from premium licenses

AI Builder features remain fully supported, but AI Builder credits are retired over time, with Copilot Credits required for continued usage. There is no automatic conversion of AI Builder credits to Copilot Credits. This transition further reinforces why clear visibility into Copilot Credit consumption is critical, especially across complex, multi‑environment deployments.

Why This Matters

As Copilot usage scales, credit consumption patterns are rarely obvious. A single busy Copilot Studio agent or API‑driven workflow can consume meaningful credits at scale, and costs quickly move from IT discussions to finance and leadership conversations. Without consolidated visibility, organizations are often reactive—discovering spikes only after invoices arrive.

This dashboard provides a reusable, extensible starting point for understanding Copilot Credit usage. It complements Microsoft’s official tools by answering different questions: Which environments drive spend? Which AI models consume the most credits? When and why did usage spike?

Getting Started

The quickest path is to grab the Power BI template from the GitHub repo:

👉 https://github.com/jbaart37/Copilot-Credits-Dashboard

The repository includes everything you need to get up and running quickly:

  • Copilot AI Credits v1.pbit
    A ready‑to‑use Power BI template. Open it, enter your Power Platform environment URL(s), and start exploring Copilot Credit usage.

  • SETUP_GUIDE.md
    Step‑by‑step instructions covering both the template path and a full manual build.

  • DAX_CALCULATIONS.md
    All measures and calculated columns used for credit extraction, aggregation, and trend analysis.

  • DATA_MODEL.md
    Details on entity relationships, composite keys, and schema design for multi‑environment reporting.

  • VISUALS_GUIDE.md
    Page layouts, visual specifications, and design guidance used in the dashboard.

If you want the fastest setup, download the .pbit file, open it in Power BI Desktop, enter your environment URL(s) when prompted, and you’re done. The template already includes all queries, relationships, calculated columns, measures, and visuals.

If you prefer to build everything from scratch—or want to understand how the pieces fit together—the setup guide walks through creating the parameterized queries, composite keys, JSON parsing logic, and date handling step by step.

Wrapping Up

This project started as a way to answer a simple question:

How are we actually using Copilot Credits across our environments?

It turned into a practical Power BI template that can be reused, extended, or completely reworked to fit different organizations and governance models.

If you’re already tracking AI consumption through the Power Platform Admin Center reports, this approach gives you more flexibility and deeper operational insight.
If you’re not tracking it at all, this is a solid place to start.

Whether you download the template and get running in minutes or follow the setup guide to understand every design decision, the goal is the same: better visibility into AI spend—and fewer surprises when the bill arrives.

👉 https://github.com/jbaart37/Copilot-Credits-Dashboard

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Analyze Copilot Credit Use in PowerBI

Build a Multi-Environment Copilot Credits Dashboard in Power BI If you’re managing AI workloads across the Power Platform—AI Builder, Copil...