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Ali Kidwai
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Editor’s Note- Today's organizations need more than just data—they need intelligent tools that transform data into action. This blog unpacks how Microsoft Fabric is doing exactly that by blending analytics with powerful generative AI and AI agents. Whether you're a data scientist, business leader, or tech decision-maker, this deep dive into Microsoft Fabric’s AI services offers critical insights into building an AI-ready enterprise. Discover how real-time intelligence, Fabric Data Agents, Copilot, and Azure integrations are reshaping the modern data estate.
When Liverpool clinched their recent Premier League win, it wasn't just the players who shined. Behind every on-field success was a team of analysts, strategists, and AI-powered systems processing real-time data — tracking passes, predicting formations, and optimizing substitutions. Football, like business, has become a game of precision. Creativity still matters. So does grit. But decisions backed by data and automated insights are what truly shift outcomes.
Now, zoom out from the pitch to the corporate boardroom. The modern enterprise scuffles with a similar dynamic like balancing creative strategy with accuracy and putting too much time on mundane tasks such as formatting reports, collating data, and aligning forecasts.
In the current scenario, organizations need a modern data estate capable of infusing AI into every layer of their business, helping data professionals to extract deeper insights, faster. To meet this need, over 25,000 organizations — including 67% of the Fortune 500's are turning to Microsoft Fabric to gain a competitive edge.
In this blog, we’ll explore how Microsoft Fabric brings AI into the heart of business operations—making it easier for teams to move beyond experimental use cases into real-time decision-making, automation, and enterprise-wide intelligence.
So, how can Microsoft Fabric help your specific business? Whether you’re in retail, CPG, or manufacturing, there’s one thing that binds us all: data. And they’ve got a lot of it. The challenge is how to turn that mountain of data into actionable insights without draining your time, money, or patience.
The power of Microsoft Fabric isn’t just in integrating data, analytics, and governance into a single platform. It’s the seamless integration with AI and machine learning that really sets it apart. Microsoft is investing heavily in AI innovation, and Fabric is at the heart of it all. With the rise of Gen AI and tools like Azure OpenAI Service, businesses can now build organization-specific AI experiences. Think of the integration with Copilot, which lets you generate AI-driven analyses and insights directly within your data environment. Or the ability to develop custom AI models, trained on your own reliable data. These efforts can help with supplying the clean, well-governed, and connected data needed to fuel AI at scale.
By adding AI capabilities in Microsoft Fabric, many organizations are now moving toward Agentic AI systems. These intelligent systems can integrate with enteprrise platforms, APIs, and databases to pull in relevant data, analyze it, enabling them to provide contextual recommendations or automate workflows — making decision-making much easier. (We’ll dive into Data Agents a bit later.)
According to a 2024 Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study by Forrester Consulting, enterprises using Microsoft Fabric reported a 379% ROI over three years, with a payback period of less than six months.
So, organizations that invest now in an AI-ready platform are creating a head start. Not just by automating repetitive tasks and boosting productivity, but especially by making better predictions. Whether it’s forecasting, demand planning, risk analysis, or churn prediction—AI is the difference between reactive and proactive management.
As per the Microsoft's Work Trend Index, 67% of early Copilot users reported that Copilot saved them time so they could focus on more crucial tasks.
Going through strangled data can be challenging, but it's quite easy with Copilot—Microsoft Fabric's AI-driven Gen AI assistant. Copilot helps users (both technical and non-technical) build data flows, generate code, and create visualizations, all through simple, conversational language. Whether you're a business user, data analyst, or developer, Copilot walks you through each step of the business, helping you unpack Fabric's full potential.
In a move that broadens access to AI, Microsoft has rolled out Copilot capabilities across all paid SKUs, including F2 and above. This marks a significant shift from previous licensing limitations. The democratisation of AI within Fabric means more teams, regardless of budget or size, can embed intelligent insights and automation into their workflows. Whether you're scaling up or just getting started, you can now tap into Copilot to accelerate decisions, optimise operations, and unlock value faster.
Many companies want real-time insights but putting them into practice is not easy. The biggest hurdle has been with fragmented data systems. Without a streamlined, end-to-end solution, enteprises have had to rely on custom setups that are tough to maintain and scale. Multiple tech stacks, data silos, and limited AI integration have only added to the challenges.
Real-Time Intelligence is becoming one of the prominent features in Microsoft Fabric, assisting teams make fast and more informed decisions. By combining AI with real-time data, now enteprises can obtain comprehensive insights and act on them in a right way.
This capability is crucial for organization that completely rely on regular updates like inventory levels, customer behavior, or financial transactions. By automatically syncing changes to the AI models, Fabric makes sure that your insights reflect the latest data, capitalizing on fast decision-making.
With this ready-to-deploy solution, it's pretty much easy for both developers and non-developers to use, speed up decision-making, simplify workflows, and boost agility.
Imagine if your business users could skip the dashboards and simply ask questions to get meaningful insights. With Microsoft Fabric AI agents, that’s now possible.
Fabric Data Agents act like intelligent copilots embedded within Microsoft Fabric. They bring together data ingestion, processing, transformation, and analytics—all in one place. Using natural language, users can interact with data through easy-to-use Q&A applications. Whether it’s analyzing trends, retrieving insights, or generating visualizations, these agents make complex data tasks easy for everyone—from business analysts to data scientists to leadership teams.
Powered by Fabric’s robust data ingestion tools like Fabric Data Factory, OneLake Shortcuts, and Database Mirroring, these agents can connect to over 200 data sources. They're also tightly integrated with Azure services such as Azure AI Agent Service and Azure OpenAI Service, delivering scalable, high-performing, and reliable experiences across the board.
Did you know Azure AI Foundry gives you access to a model catalog of over 1,800 models. That’s a vast array of capabilities at your fingertips.
In the present scenario, Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Foundry—a powerful partnership is transforming the way organizations leverage AI. It provides a unified platform for enterprise AI operations, model builders, and application development. This foundation combines production-grade infrastructure with friendly interfaces, ensuring organizations can build and operate AI applications with confidence.
With Azure AI Foundry, developers can:
What makes it even more compelling? It’s designed for scale. Azure AI Foundry helps turn your proof of concept into full-scale, production-ready applications, backed by continuous monitoring and optimization tools.
The platform is free to explore. You only pay for the services you choose—whether that’s APIs, AI models, or advanced development tools. Each product is priced individually, so you have full control over what you use and how you spend.
As organizations scale, managing the full lifecycle of machine learning (ML) models becomes increasingly complex. In the current scenario, data science teams face deployment inefficiencies due to fragmented tools. With Machine Learning adoption growing at a rapid pace, the surge in demand for integrated solutions that streamline development, monitoring, and deployment is more pressing than ever.
Microsoft Fabric addresses this requirement by offering a comprehensive platform that combines Azure ML with other Azure services. This integrated solution allows data teams to build models that forecast demand, predict customer behavior, or optimize operations. With Azure ML's integration, data science teams can utilize pre-built algorithms to their own models flexibly. By deploying models into the fabric, organizations can easily embed predictive analytics into their operations, enhancing business outputs and drive standout decision making.
A. While both Fabric data agents and copilots leverage generative AI to analyze and interact with data, they serve different purposes and offer distinct levels of flexibility:
Customization and Flexibility: Fabric data agents are highly customizable—you can define specific instructions and examples to tailor their behavior to unique scenarios. Fabric copilots, however, are pre-configured with fixed functionalities and offer limited customization.
Scope and Integration: Copilots are built to assist within Microsoft Fabric, helping users generate notebook code, queries, and other in-product tasks. Fabric data agents are more versatile and can operate as standalone entities. They can integrate with external platforms like Microsoft Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft Teams, and more, making them suitable for broader enterprise applications beyond Fabric.
A. Data plays a significant role in agentic AI, allowing AI agents to act on their own, make smart decisions, and do things that matter. That's why Microsoft Fabric expands capabilities and deepens integrations between data and AI platforms.
Data agents in Fabric (formerly known as AI skills) can retrieve insights across various sources, from lake-house and warehouse data to Power BI semantic models and KQL databases. They can generate SQL, KQL, and DAX “read” queries to extract, process, and deliver actionable insights.
By combining Fabric's analytical capabilities and AI Foundry's generative AI models, businesses can build domain-specific agents that draw from unstructured and structured enterprise data. These agents can be fine-tuned to support decision-making across business functions—integrating with systems like SharePoint, Azure AI Search, and Microsoft OneLake.
A. Managing granular data security across various applications and engines can be challenging, often leading to overly restrictive access controls or accidental data leaks. With OneLake security, you can define access permissions once, and Fabric will ensure these permissions are consistently enforced across all engines.
In this update, data owners have the authority to create security toles, fine-tune permissions, and control access to row and column levels, helping with secured data sharing. Say for example, you can restrict access to certain tables, rows, or folders in a lakehouse with PII (Personally identifiable information) while making other data accessible in place.
This secured model is automated. So, whether you are involved in data query in SQL or visualizing something on Power BI, you can only see data that you have been accessed to. Check out the demo below:
As organizations look beyond automation toward truly intelligent systems, the next wave of AI innovation is being driven by agentic AI—and Microsoft Fabric is ready to lead this shift.
This shift provides cost-efficient and a dynamic ecosystem, allowing the creation of a solid data foundation for the AI journey. With its flexible analytics capabilities and scalable cloud infra, our Microsoft Fabric AI services ensures that enteprises are not just AI-ready, but they're equipped to steadfast as AI innovations continue to evolve.
Polestar Analytics in partnership with Microsoft can be a good option for the enterprises to leverage the full potential of Fabric. We can assist you with platform's capabilities to drive AI-powered innovations. Get in touch.
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The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insights.
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