The estate you have now
If you lead reporting inside an Australian organisation, your Power BI content has probably drifted onto Microsoft Fabric over the past year. Semantic models, a lakehouse or two, a few pipelines, and a growing pile of workspaces. You are the person who gets the call when a dashboard is stale or a number looks wrong.
Microsoft ships changes to Power BI and Fabric every month. Most months you skim the headline and move on. The August and September 2026 releases are different. A few items change how your models refresh, how you recover lost items, and how your data is governed. This post covers what touches your estate and what to check now.
Two deprecations that force a decision
The first change is a deprecation with a date. Starting in October, Power BI Desktop versions from March 2026 or earlier will no longer be able to save and share files to OneDrive and SharePoint. Microsoft's fix is plain: update Power BI Desktop to keep that working. If your team runs an old build, patch it before October or saving will fail.
The second change retires a Copilot feature. Beginning 26 August 2026, the integration between Copilot in Power BI and Fabric data agents is retired, so Copilot in Power BI no longer connects directly to Fabric data agents. The reason is upstream: the integration was built on the OpenAI Assistants API, and that API is scheduled to shut down on 26 August 2026. Fabric data agents themselves stay available through other supported experiences.
If you call a data agent in code, there is a migration. Users querying a data agent with the Fabric OpenAI client can start moving to the Fabric OpenAI Responses client from 11 August 2026, before the Assistants API deprecation takes effect. Microsoft says SDK and portal users need little or no action because it migrates those experiences internally, though conversation history may reset once.
