There are two different agent surfaces with different capabilities:
- Dashboard Agent (this page) — for viewers of a published or embedded dashboard: question-and-answer about what’s on screen, plus changing your own view of the controls.
- Workbook Agent — full authoring inside a workbook: creating reports, building and editing dashboards, and running analysis.
Opening the agent
Open a published dashboard and toggle the agent panel from the dashboard header to start a conversation. Use New Chat to start a fresh thread. The panel is docked to the right side of the dashboard and is resizable — drag its edge to give the conversation more or less room. On narrow screens it switches to a compact mode so it stays usable next to the dashboard.Focusing on a specific chart
Chart-level follow-ups and attached-chart chips are rolling out. If you
don’t see the Ask a follow up question action on a chart’s menu yet, it
hasn’t reached your deployment.
⋮) and
choose Ask a follow up question. This opens the agent with that chart
attached as context, so your question is scoped to that chart’s data.
Attached charts appear as removable chips in the chat input. To drop a
chart’s focus, remove its chip. You can attach more than one chart to ask about
them together.
When a chart is attached, the agent receives a read-only snapshot of it — the
underlying SQL, the data, and the chart spec — along with the dashboard’s
current filter and time-granularity state. It uses this as context for
answering and never edits the chart’s definition. You can still ask it to change
the dashboard’s filters or time granularity — see
Changing filters and controls.
Changing filters and controls
Ask the agent, in plain language, to filter the dashboard, change a time granularity, switch a field, or set a parent control’s option, and it applies the change to the controls in front of you:- “Filter this dashboard to orders with status completed.”
- “Show only the Outerwear category.”
- “Filter to the last 30 days.”
- “Group by month.”
- “Switch that chart to show profit instead of revenue.” (a field switcher)
- “Set the region picker to EMEA.” (a parent control)
- “Reset the filters.”
- Only controls that exist on the dashboard can be changed. The agent can change a filter, time granularity, field switcher, or parent control only when the dashboard has a matching control widget for it. If there’s no control for what you asked about, the agent tells you so instead of changing anything. A control whose visibility is Disabled also can’t be changed.
- Time granularity stays within the control’s allowed granularities. If a time-granularity control restricts which granularities viewers can pick, the agent only chooses from that set.
- A field switcher can only be set to one of its offered members. The agent picks from the same Alternatives a viewer could pick from by hand.
- A parent control can only be set to one of its defined options — the agent can’t invent a new option, only choose among the ones the dashboard’s author configured.
- Changes apply to your session only. They’re applied the same way as changing a control by hand: reflected in the dashboard’s URL — so you can share or bookmark the filtered view — but not saved to the dashboard. They don’t affect what other viewers see, and the author’s saved defaults are left untouched.
Attachments
You can attach uploaded files to the conversation, and the agent can read their contents — text, PDF, ZIP, and image files are supported.Pasting an image directly from your clipboard into the chat may also be
supported. Confirm this in your deployment before relying on it.
What the Dashboard Agent can and can’t do
The published Dashboard Agent can answer questions and adjust your own view, but it never changes the saved dashboard. It can:- Answer questions about what’s on the dashboard from the dashboard’s own data
- Run read-only queries against the semantic model to go deeper — drill down, break a metric down by a dimension, or pull a longer time range than a chart shows
- Apply filters, change the time granularity, swap a field switcher’s member, and pick a parent control’s option on the dashboard you’re viewing, for controls that exist on the dashboard (your session only — see Changing filters and controls)
- Explain how a metric or dimension is defined
- Look up the values available for a dimension
- Read the contents of attachments you add to the chat
- Save its control changes to the dashboard — they apply to your session only and never change what other viewers see
- Edit the dashboard, or add/remove widgets
- Create reports or workbooks
- Change the data model
Limitations
- Control changes need a matching control widget. The agent can change a filter, time granularity, field switcher, or parent control only when a corresponding control widget exists on the dashboard, and the change applies to your session only — it is never saved to the dashboard. If you ask it to change something with no control on the dashboard, it explains the current state instead of applying a change.
- No authoring on published dashboards. The published Dashboard Agent cannot create reports or build dashboards, edit the saved dashboard, or change the data model. Those live in the Workbook Agent.
- Report search covers published reports only. When the agent searches for existing reports, it sees published reports.