With Fabric, we focused on simplicity, openness, and autonomy. All Fabric workloads work together seamlessly out-of-the-box without the myriad of infrastructure and configuration settings you typically find in data platforms so you can focus on getting results. You can ingest structured and unstructured data in any format into OneLake’s open Delta Parquet format and even access third-party tools from industry leading software companies built directly into Fabric. Advanced security, governance, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities are woven into the platform with personalized experiences for admins and users alike. Microsoft Copilot and other AI capabilities are built into every layer of Fabric to help data professionals and business users automate routine tasks and get more done. In fact, we’ve found that users were 52% faster in completing standard data analysis tasks and uncovered insights 36% more accurately when using Copilot in Fabric, with 90% saying they were likely to adopt Copilot in Fabric.¹  

Fabric’s vision for a data platform has highly resonated with the industry, and more than 17,000 customers, including 70% of the Fortune 500, are already using Fabric to empower their data teams.

• Melbourne Airport, the second busiest in Australia, used Fabric to analyze their operational data in real-time and gained 30% increased performance efficiency across data-related operations. “It’s a radical and powerful new technology that can feel just like using Microsoft Excel or Power BI. But once in the hands of the user, it doesn’t feel like a new, complex technology at all,” Irfan Khan, Head of Data and Analytics.  
• Chanel, a world leader in luxury fashion, adopted Fabric not only to drive more value from its data and support their AI innovation, but also safeguard its data at rest and in-transit with Fabric’s end-to-end, built-in security, governance, and reliability. “We chose Microsoft Fabric as the foundation of this platform, driven by its ability to implement a data mesh approach,” Olivier Barbonnat, Chief Information Officer Europe.  
• Our own Microsoft IDEAS (insights, data, engineering, analytics, systems) team, one of the largest data teams in the world, transitioned to Fabric to support its AI ambitions. Its solution now encompasses 27,000 data sources, 420 petabytes of data, 35,000 data pipelines, 38,000 semantic models, and more than 600 teams relying on its models. The IDEAS team estimated it has received a 50% efficiency boost from consolidating assets in OneLake, using modern tools such as Spark and Python, Direct Lake mode in Microsoft Power BI, and AI-assisted coding through IDEAS Copilot.

Schaeffler, Hitachi Solutions, KPMG, Epic, and many other customers have seen a transformational impact to how they process data. You can explore all these Fabric stories on the Microsoft Customer Stories page. One of the reasons Fabric caught the imagination of so many is because, with Fabric, you can simplify and future-proof your data estate. Fabric’s capabilities and workloads will continue to expand and be seamlessly infused into our pre-integrated platform, helping you keep up with the technology trends without added work.  

And since launching Fabric, we’ve added new ways to bring data into Fabric with capabilities like mirroring and new shortcut sources. We’ve expanded Copilot in Fabric across almost every experience to help everyone automate routine tasks. We’ve added a multitude of security and governance features to help you make sure your data is secure at every step of its journey. We’ve added the ability to extend Fabric further with native, industry-specific workloads from Microsoft and other software developers. And most impactfully, we launched a new workload to help organizations make better decisions from Internet of Things (IoT), logs, and telemetry data—Real-Time Intelligence.  

With Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, we transformed Fabric into a platform equipped to support your operational scenarios and data in motion. And now, we’re helping you bring transactional scenarios to Fabric with the introduction of Fabric Databases. 

Introducing a unified data platform with Fabric Databases

Currently, the data and AI technology market is massively fragmented with hundreds of vendors and thousands of services. We believe the future of data and AI is the convergence of all your data services into a unified, open, and extensible platform, so you no longer have to manually stitch together disconnected services.  

Today, we’re thrilled to announce a major leap toward this goal with Fabric Databases, now in preview. Fabric Databases represent a new class of cloud databases that brings a world-class transactional database natively to Microsoft Fabric for app developers. With the addition of Fabric Databases, Fabric now brings together both transactional and analytical workloads, creating a truly unified data platform. Developers can streamline application development with simple, autonomous, and AI-optimized databases that provision in seconds and are secured by default with features like cloud authentication and database encryption. Built-in vector search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) support, and Azure AI integration simplify AI app development, and your data is instantly available in OneLake for advanced analytics. Developers can even use Copilot in Fabric to translate natural language queries into SQL and get inline code completion alongside code fixes and explanations.

SQL database, the first available in Fabric, was built on our industry-leading SQL Server engine and the simple and intuitive SaaS platform of Fabric. In fact, data professionals who’ve tried SQL database in Fabric were able to complete common database tasks up to 71% faster and with 63% more effective task completion. They reported feeling 84% more confident in these tasks and finding the tasks up to 91% less difficult.²  These results were even more pronounced for people who were newer to cloud. Those with less than two years of cloud platform experience benefited the most in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, highlighting the simplicity and intuitiveness of Fabric Databases. 

SQL database is just the beginning for Fabric Databases, with more databases on the roadmap. Whether you’re an experienced data professional or just getting started, you can build AI apps faster and more confidently on Fabric Databases.

To learn more, read the Fabric Databases blog post, watch the Microsoft Mechanics deep dive video, and watch the following sizzle video:

General availability of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

We’re also thrilled to announce Real-Time Intelligence is now generally available. With Real-Time Intelligence, you get both pro-dev and no-code tools to ingest high-volume streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger automated actions based on the data. The Real-time hub provides a central place to discover and manage all your streaming data. Dener Motorsport, a participant in the annual Porsche Carrera Cup Brasil event, used Real-Time Intelligence for in-race analytics, and their CEO, Dener Pires, said “Before we used Microsoft Fabric and Real-Time Intelligence, it was probably 30 minutes before the engineers knew that something was wrong with a car, could get the data, analyze it, and provide a solution. Today that process is done in minutes.” Check out this blog post and the following demo to see Real-Time Intelligence in action: 

OneLake catalog—a complete catalog for discovery, management, and governance

No matter what data project you’re trying to accomplish, it starts with the right foundation. OneLake, Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake, is built for everyone in your entire organization as the single point to discover and explore your data. With OneLake shortcuts and mirroring, you can unify all of your multi-cloud and on-premise sources and enable your people to work from the same data—meaning fewer copies of data, better collaboration between your teams, and easier, more streamlined analysis. And since data is stored in an open format, you can use data in OneLake for all your data projects, no matter the vendor or service.  

Today, we’re excited to announce the OneLake catalog, a complete solution to explore, manage, and govern your entire Fabric data estate. The OneLake catalog comes with two tabs, Explore and Govern, that can help all Fabric users discover and manage trusted data, as well as provide governance for data owners with valuable insights, recommended actions, and tooling. Since the OneLake catalog is an evolution of the OneLake data hub, it already shows up in Microsoft 365, such as in Excel and Microsoft Teams and many other products in the Microsoft cloud for easy data consumption. OneLake catalog value can be extended to the Microsoft Purview data governance solution, Unified Catalog, which offers the data office, data stewards, and data owners advanced governance capabilities, including data quality and a global catalog for the heterogeneous data estate. The Explore tab is now generally available, and the Govern tab will be coming soon in preview.  

Learn more about the OneLake catalog by reading this blog post and by watching the following demo:

More Fabric innovation

The introduction of Fabric Databases and the growing opportunity with generative AI in accelerating data projects has encouraged us to reimagine the pillars of Fabric. We are now focused on making sure Fabric can provide you with: 

• An AI-powered data platform. Fabric can give your teams the AI-powered tools needed for any data project in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment. You can even extend Fabric further by adding other native workloads from the Workload Hub, created by industry-leading partners.  
• An open and AI-ready data lake. Fabric can help you access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single data lake, work from the same copy of data across analytics engines, and ensure your data is ready to power AI innovation.  
• AI-enabled business users. Fabric can empower everyone to better understand your data with AI-enhanced Q&A experiences and visuals embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day. 
• A mission-critical foundation. You can confidently deploy and manage Fabric with category-leading performance, instant scalability, shared resilience, and built-in security, governance, and compliance. 

Check out the new Fabric sizzle video to see these pillars in action: 

We’re excited to share a huge slate of announcements designed to help us better accomplish each goal above. These enhancements include: 

Fabric workload enhancements

• The general availability of sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, a single place for all your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data needs. Julie Nikulina, IT Solutions Engineer at Schaeffler AG, a global automotive and industrial supplier, mentioned that, “thanks to Microsoft Fabric, we’ll be able to answer lots of questions about climate neutrality and decarbonization company-wide via a single platform—and we can implement new use cases in short sprints within two to six weeks.”  
• Coming soon, the preview of AI functions in Fabric notebooks, which provide a simplified API for common AI text enrichments like summarization, translation, sentiment analysis, and more. 
• The general availability of API for GraphQL, which is an API to help you access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. 
• The preview of several enhancements to Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, which include new Fabric events, enhancements to Eventstreams and Eventhouses, and easier real-time dashboard sharing. 
• The preview of the Copilot in Fabric experience for data pipelines in Fabric Data Factory. 
• The preview of our integration with Esri ArcGIS for advanced spatial analytics. 

Microsoft OneLake enhancements

• The preview of open mirroring, a feature that allows any application or data provider to write change data directly into a mirrored database within Fabric. 
• The general availability of Azure SQL DB mirroring and the preview of SQL MI mirroring. 

New AI capabilities in Fabric

• Coming soon, the preview of AI skill enhancements, including a more conversational experience and support for semantic models and Eventhouse KQL databases. 
• Coming soon, the preview of AI skill integration with Agent Service in the newly announced Azure AI Foundry, allowing developers to use AI skills as a core knowledge source. 

Platform-wide enhancements

• The preview of workspace monitoring, which provides detailed diagnostic logs for workspaces to troubleshoot performance issues, capacity performance, and data downtime. 
• The general availability of the Workload Development Kit, created to help software developers design, build, and interoperate applications within Fabric. We’re excited to see many of our industry-leading partners announce preview of their workload hub offerings, including Quantexa, SAS, Teradata, Osmos, Esri, and Profisee. 
• The preview of further integration with Microsoft Purview including extending Protection policies to enforce access permissions to more sources and using Data Loss Prevention policies to restrict access to semantic models with sensitive data. 
• The general availability of external data sharing allows you to directly share OneLake tables and folders with other Fabric tenants in an easy, quick, and secure manner. 
• Fabric is FedRAMP High certified for the Azure Commercial cloud, the highest level of compliance and security standards required by the federal government for cloud service providers. Now government agencies can run Fabric on the Azure Commercial cloud while maintaining strict compliance. 

You can learn more about all of these announcements and so much more in the Fabric November 2024 Update blog post and the numerous blog posts that will go live throughout this week on the Fabric blog channel.  

Fabric billing and consumption updates

Finally, we’re making some important changes to Fabric’s billing model. First, coming soon, organizations with multiple capacities can now direct Copilot in Fabric consumption and billing to a specific capacity, no matter where the Copilot in Fabric usage actually takes place. Admins can assign specific members of their organization to the specified F64 or higher capacity for all of their Copilot requests. These requests will be consumed and billed on that assigned F64+ capacity, ensuring Copilot in Fabric usage doesn’t impact priority jobs while expanding Copilot access to any workspace regardless of its capacity.

Additionally, we’re providing capacity admins with more control over the Fabric jobs running in their capacities. Surge protection, now in preview, helps protect capacities from unexpected surges in background workload consumption. Admins can use surge protection to set a limit on background activity consumption, which will prevent background jobs from starting when reached. Admins can configure different limits for each capacity in your organization to give you the flexibility to meet your needs.

Watch Fabric in action at Microsoft Ignite

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 from November 19 to November 21, 2024 to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions:  

• “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” with Arun Ulagaratchagan and Amir Netz
• “Power AI apps with unified data and insights in Microsoft Fabric” with Panos Antonopoulos, Anna Hoffman, and Asad Khan 
• “Ingest, govern, and secure your data with OneLake” with Josh Caplan, Wilson Lee, and Adi Regev 
• “Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the era of AI” with Yitzhak Kesselman, Tessa Kloster, Niraj Revankar, Vijay Sankaran, and Ksenia Suresh. 

And six other Fabric breakout sessions. You can also join us at labs and theater sessions throughout the event. Find all the data-related sessions at Ignite. You can also learn about other announcements across our Azure portfolio by reading these blogs by Jessica Hawk and Omar Khan. 

• The next wave of Azure innovation: Azure AI Foundry, intelligent data, and more: We’re bringing a huge range of innovation to our AI platform including the new Azure AI Foundry, a unified platform designed to empower both developers and business decision-makers in the age of AI. 
• Scale your AI transformation with a powerful, secure, and adaptive cloud infrastructure: We’re also announcing cloud and AI infrastructure announcements, from advancements in chips and liquid cooling to new data integrations and more flexible cloud deployments.  

Finally, if you want more strategic guidance to help you along your data and analytics journey in the era of AI, you should watch the recent Data and Analytics Forum.

Getting started with Microsoft Fabric

New customers can try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no credit card information required. Learn how to start your free trial.  

If you’re considering purchasing Fabric and need help deciding on a SKU, we’re excited to share a new Fabric SKU estimator, now in private preview. You can sign up to try out this tool as part of the early adopter program—try the SKU estimator.

Start building your Fabric skills

Be one of the first to start using Fabric Databases

Ready to build reliable, highly scalable applications where cloud authentication and encryption are secured by default? Starting December 3, 2024, join live sessions with database experts and see just how easy it is to get started. View the schedule and register for the series.

Get certified in Microsoft Fabric—for free

Get ready to fast-track your career by earning your Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification. For a limited time, we’re offering 5,000 free DP-600 exam vouchers to eligible Fabric community members. Complete your exam by the end of the year and join the ranks of certified experts. Don’t miss this opportunity to get certified. 

A new Fabric certification for data engineers

We’re excited to announce a brand-new certification for data engineers. The new Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification will help you demonstrate your skills with data ingestion, transformation, administration, monitoring, and performance optimization in Fabric. To earn this certification, pass Exam DP-700: Implementing Data Engineering Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric, currently in beta.

Join us at the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Looking to gain hands-on experience with Fabric and learn directly from the people who created it? If so, join us from March 29 to April 3, 2025, at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Register today. 

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Fabric:  

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial. 
• Register for the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum. 
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap. 
• Visit the Fabric website. 
• Join the Fabric community. 
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners:

• “Data Governance in Microsoft Fabric with Microsoft Purview,” by CloudThat Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
•  “Key Fabric Announcements and Overview of Fabric Databases,” by Telefónica Tech.
• “Architecting tomorrow—A Microsoft Fabric Blueprint to intelligent enterprise covering Fabric Databases, AI Skills, Fabric and Microsoft Purview, Apache Iceberg support in OneLake,” by Avasoft Inc.
• “Microsoft Fabric Databases,” “Microsoft Fabric’s AI Skills,” and “Data Engineering: Liquid Clustering in Fabric,” by Verne Tech.
• “A First Look at Fabric Mirroring for SQL Managed Instance,” by Coeo Ltd.
• “Leveraging Microsoft Fabric for Dynamics 365 with Dataverse,” and “Automating Data Workflows in Microsoft Fabric: A Low-Code/No-Code Approach,” by PreludeSys.
• “Enabling self-service for supply chain analytics with Microsoft Fabric and Direct Lake,” “Transforming data operations with Microsoft Fabric and CI/CD for ISVs,” and “How Microsoft Fabric transformed data analytics for an ISV with Real-Time Intelligence,” by MAQ Software.       

¹Based upon n=209 user studies conducted by Microsoft Corporation in October 2024 that measured four common metrics associated with the consumption experience of Power BI in Microsoft Fabric. Qualitative sentiment gathered upon task completion. The actual results may vary. 

²Based upon n=210 user studies conducted with technical practitioners by Microsoft Corporation in October 2024 that measured time to complete four common tasks associated with AI application development on a SQL database in Microsoft Fabric and on Azure SQL Database. Actual results may vary based upon individual performance and sentiment

The post Accelerate app innovation with an AI-powered data platform appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Today, we’re announcing new agentic capabilities that will accelerate these gains and bring AI-first business process to every organization. 

• First, the ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio will be in public preview next month.  

• Second, we’re introducing ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for every sales, service, finance and supply chain team. 

Copilot is your AI assistant — it works for you — and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain.  

Empowering more customers to build autonomous agents in Copilot Studio 

Earlier this year, we announced a host of powerful new capabilities in Copilot Studio, including the ability to create autonomous agents. Next month, these capabilities are shifting from private to public preview, allowing more customers to reimagine critical business processes with AI. Agents draw on the context of your work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric, and can support everything from your IT help desk to employee onboarding and act as a personal concierge for sales and service.  

Organizations like Clifford Chance, McKinsey & Company, Pets at Home and Thomson Reuters are already creating autonomous agents to increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact. Pets at Home, the U.K.’s leading pet care business, created an agent for its profit protection team to more efficiently compile cases for skilled human review, which could have the potential to drive a seven-figure annual savings. McKinsey & Company is creating an agent that will speed up the client onboarding process. The pilot showed lead time could be reduced by 90% and administrative work reduced by 30%. Thomson Reuters built a professional-grade agent to speed up the legal due diligence workflow, with initial testing showing some tasks could be done in half the time. This agent can help Thomson Reuters increase the efficiency of work for clients and boost its new business pipeline.  

Scaling your teams with 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365  

New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy lines of business applications to AI-first business process. AI is today’s ROI and tomorrow’s competitive edge. These new agents are designed to help every sales, service, finance and supply chain team drive business value — and are just the start. We will create many more agents in the coming year that will give customers the competitive advantage they need to future-proof their organization. Today, we’re introducing ten of these autonomous agents. Here are a few examples: 

• Sales Qualification Agent: In a profession where time literally equals money, this agent enables sellers to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities while the agent researches leads, helps prioritize opportunities and guides customer outreach with personalized emails and responses. 

• Supplier Communications Agent: This agent enables customers to optimize their supply chain and minimize costly disruptions by autonomously tracking supplier performance, detecting delays and responding accordingly — freeing procurement teams from time consuming manual monitoring and firefighting. 

• Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge Management Agents: A business gets one chance to make a first impression, and these two agents are game changers for customer care teams facing high call volumes, talent shortages and heightened customer expectations. These agents work hand in hand with a customer service representative by learning how to resolve customer issues and autonomously adding knowledge-based articles to scale best practices across the care team. 

As agents become more prevalent in the enterprise, customers want to be confident that they have robust data governance and security. The agents coming to Dynamics 365 follow our core security, privacy and responsible AI commitments. Agents built in Copilot Studio include guardrails and controls established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge and actions. The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls — all managed in Copilot Studio. These include data loss prevention, robust authentication protocols and more. Once these agents are created, IT administrators can apply a comprehensive set of features to govern their use. 

Microsoft’s own transformation  

At Microsoft, we’re using Copilot and agents to reimagine business process across every function while empowering employees to scale their impact. Using Copilot, one sales team has achieved 9.4% higher revenue per seller and closed 20% more deals(2). And thanks to Copilot, one team is resolving customer cases nearly 12% faster(3). Our Marketing team is seeing a 21.5% increase in conversion rate on Azure.com with a custom agent designed to assist buyers(4). And in Human Resources, our employee self-service agent is helping answer questions with 42% greater accuracy(5).  

With Copilot and agents, the possibilities are endless — we can’t wait to see what you create. Start building agents in Copilot Studio today. Read more about autonomous agent capabilities on the Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 blogs. Head to WorkLab for more insights on Microsoft’s own AI transformation.

NOTES

1. Statistics are from an internal Honeywell survey of 5,000 employees where 611 employees responded.
2. Internal Microsoft Sales Team data based on 687 sellers of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Jan. – June 2024, as compared with sellers with low usage of Copilot. Regular usage of Copilot means sellers who use Copilot daily at least 50% of the time during the testing period.
3. Internal CSS experiment conducted by Microsoft, 600 participants using Copilot Q&A function, Azure Core team, Nov. – Dec. 2023. These results are statistically significant at the 95th% confidence interval.
4. Internal Microsoft Marketing team data, June – Sept. 2024. Conversion means initiating the free account sign-up process on Azure.com.
5. Internal HR experiment conducted by Microsoft, 33 participants, Oct. 2024. These results are statistically significant at the 95th% confidence interval.

The post New autonomous agents scale your team like never before appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

But as you prepare for a future built on AI, you also need clean data to fuel AI. Fostering game-changing AI innovation requires a well-orchestrated data estate that can support everything from small AI pet-projects to scalable AI solutions that span the company. This is a challenging prospect for most organizations whose data environments have grown organically over time with specialized and fragmented solutions. A complex data estate leads to data sprawl and duplication, infrastructure inefficiencies, limited interoperability, and even data exposure risks—not an ideal place to start your AI innovation.

For data leaders trying to streamline and advance their data estate, the burden is often on you to search through the thousands of data and AI offerings, find the right set of offerings, figure out how to integrate them, and do it in such a way that is scalable and can evolve over time. Most data leaders would rather focus on the outcomes of their tools rather than spend all their time integrating specialized solutions and maintaining their data estate.

If you are thinking about how you can prepare your data estate for the era of AI, or will soon, I invite you to join us for the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum on October 30^th, 2024. The event is online only and free to attend.

A digital event designed for data leaders 

Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum

Learn how you can prepare your data and analytics for game-changing AI innovations.

Register here

The Data and Analytics Forum is an upcoming, digital event designed to help data leaders navigate the current data and AI landscape. Microsoft experts will walk you through the latest trends and industry best practices to help you stay ahead of the curve. You will also hear learnings from current data leaders who have successfully implemented an AI-ready data strategy. Finally, we will highlight how the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, a suite of analytics, database, AI, and governance technologies, can help you create a powerful, agile, and secure data and AI foundation, made simple.

The first half of the event will include a keynote session on the current data and AI landscape, followed by your choice of three breakout sessions. Here are the full list of sessions: 

• Data and Analytics Forum keynote: Jessica Hawk, Corporate Vice President of Data, AI, and Digital Applications, will cover the current data landscape now with AI, how the Microsoft Intelligence Platform can help organizations transform their data estate, and, through a fireside chat with customers, how companies have been able to prepare their data estate to take advantage of AI. 

• A data foundation that unlocks AI innovation: Emerson Gatchalian, Chief Data and Analytics Officer Americas, will zoom out to study the concepts and conditions at the root of today’s data and analytics stack, from what’s driving investment to the issues companies face in siloed data. Then he’ll show how the right data foundation can meet this AI moment. 

• Fuel your data culture with generative AI: In my session, we’ll explore both the challenges and opportunities that data leaders face in building a data-driven culture and how modern tools and next generation AI can help accelerate your path. 

• Data governance in the era of AI: Karthik Ravindran, General Manager of Enterprise Data and AI Governance will cover governance and its importance in an AI world, the influence of data on AI, and the opportunities and the quality challenges of generative AI. Governance practices will be covered, leading to an overview of Microsoft Purview.

Register today

Register now for the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum and learn how to prepare your organization to take advantage of the latest data and AI innovations.

See the latest innovation coming to Fabric

Check out the latest capabilities coming to the Microsoft Fabric platform by reading the European Fabric Community Conference 2024 announcement blog.

We will also be releasing even more innovation at Microsoft Ignite this year. You’ll see demos of the latest capabilities for Fabric and across all Microsoft products. You can also connect with experts, community leaders, and partners who can help you modernize and manage your own intelligent apps, safeguard your business and data, accelerate productivity, and so much more. 

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric 

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric:

• Sign up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial. 

• View the updated Microsoft Fabric Roadmap. 

• Visit the Microsoft Fabric website. 

• Join the Fabric community. 

• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 

• Explore the Fabric technical documentation. 

¹Expanding AI’s impact with organizational learning.

The post Navigate the data and AI landscape by joining us at the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Thank you to everyone joining us at the first annual European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference this week in Stockholm, Sweden! Besides seeing the beautiful views of Old Town, attendees are getting an immersive analytics and AI experience across 120 sessions, 3 keynotes, 10 workshops, an expo hall, community lounge, and so much more. They are seeing firsthand the latest capabilities we are bringing to the Fabric platform. For those unable to attend, this blog will highlight the most significant announcements that are already changing the way our customers interact with Fabric. 

Microsoft Fabric

Learn how to set up Fabric for your business and discover resources that help you take the first steps

Try Fabric today

Over 14,000 customers have invested in the promise of Microsoft Fabric to accelerate their analytics including industry-leaders like KPMG, Chanel, and Grupo Casas Bahia. For example, Chalhoub Group, a regional luxury retailer with over 750 experiential retail stories, used Microsoft Fabric to modernize its analytics and streamline its data sources into one platform, significantly speeding up their processes.

“It’s about what the technology enables us to achieve—a smarter, faster, and more connected operational environment.”

—Mark Hourany, Director of People Analytics, Chalhoub Group

Check out the myriad ways customers are using Microsoft Fabric to unlock more value from their data:

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric

Since launching Fabric, we’ve released thousands of product updates to create a more complete data platform for our customers. And we aren’t slowing down anytime soon. We’re thrilled to share a new slate of announcements that are applying the power of AI to help you accelerate your data projects and get more done.

Specifically, these updates are focused on making sure Fabric can provide you with: 

1. AI-powered development: Fabric can give teams the AI-powered tools needed for any data project in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment.

2. An AI-powered data estate: Fabric can help you access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single, open data lake, work from the same copy of data across analytics engines, and use that data to power AI innovation 

3. AI-powered insights: Fabric can empower everyone to better understand their data with AI-powered visuals and Q&A experiences embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day. 

Let’s look at the latest features and integrations we are announcing in each of these areas. 

AI-powered development

With Microsoft Fabric, you have a single platform that can handle all of your data projects with role-specific tools for data integration, data warehousing, data engineering, data science, real-time intelligence, and business intelligence. All of your data teams can work together in the same pre-integrated, optimized experience, and get started immediately with an intuitive UI and low code tools. All the workloads access the same unified data lake, OneLake, and work from a single pool of capacity to simplify the experience and ease collaboration. With built-in security and governance, you can secure your data from any intrusion and ensure only the right people have access to the right data. And as we continue to infuse Copilot and other AI experiences across Fabric, you can not only use Fabric for any application, but also accelerate time to production. In the video below, check out how users can take advantage of Copilot to create end-to-end solutions in Fabric: 

Today, I’m thrilled to share several new enhancements and capabilities coming to the platform and each workload in Fabric.

Fabric platform

We’re building platform-wide capabilities to help you more seamlessly manage DevOps, tackle projects of any scale and complexity. First, we’re updating the UI for deployment pipelines, in preview, to be more focused, easier to navigate, and have a smoother flow, now in preview. Next, we’re introducing the Terraform provider for Fabric, in preview, to help customers ensure deployments and management tasks are executed accurately and consistently. The Terraform provider enables users to automate and streamline deployment and management processes using a declarative configuration language. We are also adding support for Azure service principal in Microsoft Fabric REST APIs to help customers automate the deployment and management of Fabric environments. You can manage principal permissions for Fabric workspaces, as well as the creation and management of Fabric artifacts like eventhouses and lakehouses.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Fabric Git integration. Sync Fabric workspaces with Git repositories, leverage version control, and collaborate seamlessly using Azure DevOps or GitHub. We are also extending our integration with Visual Studio Code (VS Code). You can now debug Fabric notebooks with the web version of VS Code and integrate Fabric environments as artifacts with the Synapse VS Code extension—allowing you to explore and manage Fabric environments from within VS Code. To learn more about these updates, read the Fabric September 2024 Update blog.

Security and governance

To help organizations govern the massive volumes of data across their data estate, we’re adding more granular data management capabilities including item tagging and enhancements to domains—both of which are now in preview. We’re introducing the ability to apply tags to Fabric items, helping users more easily find and use the right data. Once applied, data consumers can view, search, and filter by the applied tags across various experiences. We’re also enhancing domains and subdomains with more controls for admins including the ability to define a default sensitivity label, domain level export and sharing settings, and insights for admins, on tenant domains. Finally, for data owners, we’re adding the ability to search for data by domain, to filter workspaces by domain, and to view domain details in a data item’s location.

Over the past year, we’ve launched a myriad of security features designed to secure your data at every step of the analytics journey. Two of our network security features, trusted workspace access, and managed private endpoints, were previously only available in F64 or higher capacities. We’re excited to share that, based on your feedback, we are making these features available in all Fabric capacities. We’re also making managed private endpoints available in trial capacities as part of this release.

We’re also announcing deeper integration with Microsoft Purview, Microsoft’s unified data security, data governance, and compliance solution. Coming soon, security admins will be able to use Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to manage who has access to Fabric items with certain labels—similar to Microsoft 365. Also coming soon, we are extending support for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, so security admins can apply DLP policies to detect the upload of sensitive data, like social security numbers, to a lakehouse in Fabric. If detected, the policy will trigger an automatic audit activity, can alert the security admin, and can even show a custom policy tip to data owners to remedy themselves. These capabilities will be available at no additional cost during preview in the near term, but will be part of a new Purview pay-as-you-go consumptive model, with pricing details to follow in the future. Learn more about how to secure your Fabric data with Microsoft Purview by watching the following video: 

You can also complement and extend the built-in governance in Fabric by seamlessly connecting your Fabric data to the newly reimagined Purview Data Governance solution—now generally available. This new solution delivers an AI-powered, business-friendly, and unified solution that can seamlessly connect to data sources within Fabric and across your data estate to streamline and accelerate the activation of your modern data governance practice. Purview integrations enable Fabric customers to discover, secure, govern, and manage Fabric items from a single pane of glass within Purview for an end-to-end approach to their data estate. Learn more about these Microsoft Purview innovations.  

Workload enhancements and updates

We’re also making significant updates across the six core workloads in Fabric: Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Science, Real-Time Intelligence, and Microsoft Power BI.

Data Factory

In the Data Factory workload, built to help you solve some of the most complex data integration scenarios, we are simplifying the data ingestion experience with copy job, transforming the dataflow capability, and releasing enhancements for data pipelines. With copy job, now in preview, you can ingest data at petabyte scale, without creating a dataflow or data pipeline. Copy job supports full, batch, and incremental copy from any data sources to any data destinations. Next, we are releasing the Copilot in Fabric experience for Dataflows Gen2 into general availability—empowering everyone to design dataflows with the help of an AI-powered expert. We’re also releasing Fast Copy in Dataflows Gen2 into general availability, enabling you to ingest large amounts of data using the same high-performance backend for data movement used in Data Factory (e.g., “copy” activity in data pipelines, or copy job). Lastly for Dataflows Gen2, we are introducing incremental refresh into preview, allowing you to limit refreshes to just new or updated data to reduce refresh times.

Along with the dataflow announcements, we’re announcing an array of enhancements for data pipelines in Fabric, including the general availability of the on-premises data gateway integration, the preview of Fabric user data functions in data pipelines, the preview of invoke remote pipeline to call Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Synapse pipelines from Fabric, and a new session tag parameter for Fabric Spark notebook activity to enable high-concurrency Notebook runs. Additionally, we’ve made it easier to bring ADF pipelines into Fabric by linking your existing pipelines to your Fabric workspace. You’ll be able to fully manage your ADF factories directly from the Fabric workspace UI and convert your ADF pipelines into native Fabric pipelines with an open-source GitHub project. 

Data Engineering

For the Data Engineering workload, we’re updating the native execution engine for Fabric Spark and releasing upgraded Fabric Runtime 1.3 into general availability. The native execution engine enhances Spark job performance by running queries directly on lakehouse infrastructure, achieving up to four times faster performance compared to traditional Spark based on the TPC-DS 1TB benchmark. The native execution engine can now, in preview, support Fabric Runtime 1.3, which together can further enhance the performance of Spark jobs and queries for both data engineering and data science projects. This engine has been completely rewritten to offer superior query performance across data processing; extract, transform, load (ETL); data science, and interactive queries. We are also excited to announce a new acceleration tab and UI enablement for the native execution engine.

Additionally, we are announcing an extension of support in Spark to mirrored databases, providing a consistent and convenient way to access and explore databases seamlessly with the Spark engine. You can easily add data sources, explore data, perform transformations, and join your data with other lakehouses and mirrored databases. Finally, we are excited to launch T-SQL notebooks into public preview. The T-SQL notebook enables SQL developers to author and run T-SQL code with a connected Fabric data warehouse or SQL analytics endpoint, allowing them to execute complex T-SQL queries, visualize results in real-time, and document analytical process within a single, cohesive interface. 

Data Warehouse

We are excited to announce the Copilot in Fabric experience for Data Warehouse is now in preview. This AI assistant experience can help developers generate T-SQL queries for data analysis, explain and add in-line code comments for existing T-SQL queries, fix broken T-SQL code, and answer questions about general data warehousing tasks and operations. Learn more about the Copilot experience for Data Warehouse here. And as mentioned above, we are announcing T-SQL notebooks—allowing you to create a notebook item directly from the data warehouse editor in Fabric and use the rich capabilities of notebooks to run T-SQL queries.

Real-Time Intelligence

In May 2024, we launched a new workload called Real-Time Intelligence that combined Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator with a range of additional new features, currently in preview, to help organizations make better decisions with up-to-the-minute insights. We are excited to share new capabilities, all in preview, to help you better ingest, analyze, and visualize your real-time data.

First, we’re announcing the launch of the new Real-Time hub user experience; a redesigned and enhanced experience with a new left navigation, a new page called “My Streams” to create and access custom streams, and four new eventstream connectors: Azure SQL Managed Instance – change data capture (MI CDC), SQL Server on Virtual Machine – change data capture (VM CDC), Apache Kafka, and Amazon MSK Kafka. These new sources empower you to build richer, more dynamic eventstreams in Fabric. We’re also enhancing eventstream capabilities by supporting eventhouse as a new destination for your data streams. Eventhouses, equipped with KQL databases, are designed to analyze large volumes of data, particularly in scenarios that demand real-time insight and exploration.

We’re also pleased to announce an upgrade to the Copilot in Fabric experience in Real-Time Intelligence, which translates natural language into KQL, helping you better understand and explore your data stored in Eventhouse. Now, the assistant supports a conversational mode, allowing you to ask follow-up questions that build on previous queries within the chat. With the addition of multi-variate anomaly detection, it’s even easier to discover the unknowns in your high-volume, high-granularity data. You can also have Copilot create a real-time dashboard instantly based on the data in your table, providing immediate insights you can share in your organization.

Finally, we are upgrading the Data Activator experience to make it easier to define a variety of rules to act in response to changes in your data over time, and the richness of our rules have improved to include more complex time window calculations and responding to every event in a stream. You can set up alerts from all your streaming data, Power BI visuals, and real-time dashboards and now even set up alerts directly on your KQL queries. With these new enhancements, you can make sure action is taken the moment something important happens.

Learn more about all of these workload enhancements in the Fabric September 2024 Update blog.

Power BI

We’re thrilled to announce new capabilities across Power BI that will make it easier to track and use the KPIs that matter most to you, create organizational apps, and work with Direct Lake semantic models. 

First, we are announcing the preview of Metric sets which will allow users to promote consistent and reliable metrics in large organizations across Fabric, making it easier for end users to discover and use standardized metrics from corporate models. With Metric sets, trusted creators within an organization can develop standardized metrics, which incorporate essential business logic from Power BI. These creators can organize the metrics into collections, promote and certify them, and make them easily discoverable for end users and other creators. These endorsed and promoted metrics can then be used to build Power BI reports, improving data quality across the organization, and can also be reused in other Fabric solutions, such as notebooks.

We’re improving organizational apps in Power BI, a key tool for packaging and securely distributing Power BI reports to your organization. Now in preview, you can create multiple organizational apps in each workspace, and they can contain other Fabric items like notebooks and real-time dashboards. The app interface can even be customized, giving you more control over the color, navigation style, and landing experience.

We’re also making it easier to work with Direct Lake semantic models with new version history for semantic models, similar to the experience found across the Microsoft 365 apps. Power BI users can also now live edit Direct Lake semantic models right from Power BI Desktop. And we’re excited to announce a capability widely asked for by Power BI users: a dark mode in Power BI Desktop. 

Finally, we’re announcing the general availability of OneLake integration for semantic models in Import mode. OneLake integration automatically writes data imported into your semantic models to Delta Lake tables in OneLake so that you can enjoy the benefits of Fabric without any migration effort. Once added to a lakehouse in OneLake, you can use T-SQL, Python, Scala, PySpark, Spark SQL, or R on these Delta tables to consume this data and add business value. All of this value comes at no additional cost as data stored in OneLake for Power BI import semantic models is included in the price of your Power BI licensing.

Learn more about the Power BI announcements in the Power BI September 2024 Feature blog. Also see the AI-powered insights section below for new Copilot experiences for Power BI creators and consumers.

AI-powered data estate

With OneLake, Fabric’s unified data lake, you can create a truly AI-powered data estate to fuel your AI innovation and data culture. OneLake’s shortcuts and mirroring capabilities enable you to access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single, intuitively organized data lake. With your data in OneLake, you can then work from a single copy across analytics engines, whether you are using Spark, T-SQL, KQL, or Analysis Services and even access that data from other apps like Microsoft Excel or Teams. Today, we are thrilled to share even more capabilities and enhancements coming to OneLake that can help you better connect to and manage your data estate.

One of the biggest benefits of OneLake is the ability to create shortcuts to your data sources, which virtualizes data in OneLake without moving or duplicating it. We are pleased to announce that shortcuts for Google Cloud Services (GCS) and S3-compatible sources are now generally available. These shortcuts also support the on-premise data gateway, which you can use to connect to your on-premise S3 compatible sources as well as GCS buckets that are protected by a virtual private cloud. We’ve also made enhancements to the REST APIs for OneLake shortcuts, including adding support for all current shortcut types and introducing a new list operation. With these improvements, you can programmatically create and manage your OneLake shortcuts.

We’re also excited to announce further integration with Azure Databricks with the ability to access Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly from OneLake—now in preview. Users can just provide the Azure Databricks workspace URL and select the catalog, and Fabric creates a shortcut for every table in the selected catalog, keeping the data in sync in near real-time. Once your Azure Databricks Catalog item is created, it behaves the same as any other item in Fabric, so you can access the table through SQL endpoints, notebooks, or Direct Lake mode for Power BI reports. Learn more about the OneLake shortcut and Azure Databricks announcements in the Fabric September 2024 Updates blog.

At Microsoft Build last May, we announced an expanded partnership with Snowflake that gives our customers the flexibility to easily connect and work across our tools. Today, I’m excited to share progress on this partnership with the upcoming preview of shortcuts to Iceberg tables. In the coming weeks, Microsoft Fabric engines will be able to consume Iceberg data with no movement or duplication using OneLake shortcuts. Simply point to an Iceberg dataset from Snowflake or another Iceberg-compatible service, and OneLake virtualizes the table as a Delta Lake table for broad compatibility across Fabric engines. This means you can work with a single copy of your data across Snowflake and Fabric. With the ability to write Iceberg data to OneLake from Snowflake, Snowflake customers will have the flexibility to store Iceberg data in OneLake and use it across Fabric.

Finally, we’ve released mirroring support for Snowflake databases into general availability—providing a seamless, no-ETL experience for integrating existing Snowflake data with the rest of your data in Microsoft Fabric. With this capability, you can continuously replicate Snowflake data directly into Fabric OneLake in near real-time, while maintaining strong performance on your transactional workloads. Learn more about Snowflake mirroring in Fabric.

AI-powered insights

With your data teams using the AI-enhanced tools in Fabric to accelerate development of insights across your data estate, you then need to ensure these insights reach those who can use them to inform decisions. With easy-to-understand Power BI reports and AI-powered Q&A experiences, Fabric bridges the gap between data and business results to help you foster a culture that empowers everyone to find data-driven answers.

We’re announcing a richer Copilot experience in Power BI to help create reports in a clearer, more transparent way. This new experience, now in preview, includes improved conversational abilities between you and Copilot that makes it easier to provide more context to Copilot initially so you can get the report you need on the first try. Copilot will even provide report outlines to improve transparency on data fields being used. We are also releasing the ability to auto-generate descriptions for measures into general availability. Lastly, report viewers can now use Copilot to summarize a report or page right from the Power BI mobile app, now in preview.

We’re also enhancing email subscriptions for reports by extending dynamic per recipient subscriptions to include both paginated and Power BI reports. With dynamic subscriptions, you can set up a single email subscription that delivers customized reports to each recipient based on the data in the semantic model. For reports that are too large for email format, we are also giving you the ability to deliver Power BI and paginated report subscriptions to a OneDrive or SharePoint location for easy access. Finally, you can now create print-ready, parameterized paginated reports using the Get Data experience in Power BI Report Builder—accessing over 100 data sources.

Learn more about all of the Power BI announcements in the Power BI September 2024 Feature blog. 

Start building your Fabric skills

We are grateful so many of you have decided to grow your skills with Microsoft Fabric. In the past six months alone, more than 17,000 individuals have earned the Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification, making it the fastest growing certification in Microsoft’s history. Today, we’re excited to announce a brand-new certification for data engineers coming in late October. The new Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification will help you prove your skills with data ingestion, transformation, administration, monitoring, and performance optimization in Fabric. 

Our portfolio of Microsoft Credentials for Fabric also includes four Microsoft Applied Skills, which are a complement to Microsoft certifications and free of cost. Applied Skills test your ability to complete a real-world scenario in a lab environment and provide you with formal credentials that showcase your technical skills to employers. For Fabric, we have Applied Skills credentials covering implementing lakehouses, data warehouses, data science and real-time intelligence solutions. 

Visit the Fabric Career Hub to get the best free resources to help you get certified and the latest certification exam discounts. Don’t forget to also join the vibrant Fabric community to connect with like-minded data professionals, get all your Fabric technical questions answered, and stay current on the latest product updates, training programs, events, and more. 

And if you want to test your skills, explore Fabric, and win prizes, you can also register for the Microsoft Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon. To learn more, you can join our Ask Me Anything event on October 8. 

Join us at Microsoft Ignite

We are excited to bring even more innovation to the Microsoft Fabric platform at Microsoft Ignite this year. Join us from November 19 through November 21, 2024 either in person in Chicago or online. You will see firsthand the latest solutions and capabilities across all of Microsoft and connect with experts, community leaders, and partners who can help you modernize and manage your own intelligent apps, safeguard your business and data, accelerate productivity, and so much more. 

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric: 

• Sign up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Register for the upcoming Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum. 
• View the updated Microsoft Fabric Roadmap.
• Visit the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
• Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners: 
  • Plug and play Databricks Unity Catalog in the Microsoft Fabric data platform and Why Microsoft Fabric is critical for AI-driven enterprises, by Sonata Software, a leading Modernization Engineering company. 
  • Citizen developers can scale work with IT pros like never before with Microsoft Fabric, by iLink Digital, a global provider of next-generation digital transformative solutions. 
  • Significance of version history for Direct Lake semantic models, by Softcrylic, now part of Hexaware Technologies, a global technology and business process services company.  
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

The post European Fabric Community Conference 2024: Building an AI-powered data platform appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Together with our customers and partners, we have established how AI Transformation enriches employee experiences, reinvents customer engagement, reshapes business processes and bends the curve on pragmatic innovation. Our approach to put a Copilot on every desk for every role, identify AI design patterns and build a strong cybersecurity foundation is helping organizations harness AI responsibly, securely and with purpose.

As I looked back on the year, I enjoyed reviewing hundreds of customer and partner examples from around the world that demonstrated how AI Transformation delivered tangible business outcomes and value for their organizations. I am pleased to highlight 20 of those stories that I found to be the most inspirational and illustrative of what we can achieve together.

Audi is taking in-car voice control to the next level by integrating ChatGPT into its MIB 3 infotainment system using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, making driving safer and more enjoyable. With this update, Audi’s voice assistant will become even more intuitive, handling complex questions and offering a truly conversational experience for drivers and passengers using natural language. Starting this month, nearly two million Audi models made since 2021 are being upgraded with this generative AI-powered experience, allowing drivers to more easily control infotainment, navigation and air-conditioning systems, as well as ask general knowledge questions.

To help address Taiwan’s chronic shortage of health care workers, Chi Mei Medical Center developed AI copilots built with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to help overworked staff lighten their workloads while ensuring patient safety. With copilots implemented throughout its operations and at multiple patient touchpoints, medical center staff are seeing impressive results. Doctors now spend 15 minutes instead of an hour writing medical reports, and nurses can document patient information in under 5 minutes per patient instead of 10 to 20 minutes. Pharmacists are now able to double the number of patients they see per day — from 15 to 30 — by leveraging a copilot for comprehensive clinical summaries across multiple databases. By bending the curve on innovation and deploying these copilots, staff have more time to focus on patient care and outcomes, while reducing burnout and stress.

Coles, a leading Australian supermarket chain, is transforming the retail experience by leveraging AI to deepen its relationships with shoppers and improve efficiency in its stores. Coles has deployed AI models that predict the flow of 20,000 stock keeping units to 850 stores with remarkable accuracy. They are now generating 1.6 billion predictions daily, ensuring every shopper finds exactly what they are looking for when they need it. Using an AI model, Coles is also reinventing customer engagement by identifying customer patterns to provide its more than 4 million loyalty club customers with bespoke product recommendations weekly. The company is also utilizing Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and NVIDIA’s A16 GPUs to streamline checkout processes, enhance queue monitoring and elevate customer satisfaction by significantly reducing wait times.

In its quest to transform aquaculture in Indonesia, eFishery harnessed the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to create Mas Ahya, a generative AI assistant available through a mobile application. Mas Ahya equips farmers with aquaculture expertise right at their fingertips, enabling them to monitor water quality, estimate market prices and manage feeding schedules effectively. It also offers real-time insights and recommendations to maintain ideal pond conditions for more precise feeding — shortening the time from fry to market size fish from four to three-and-a-half months. By utilizing this AI assistant for queries on a range of topics — from plankton levels to remedies for diseases or bacteria affecting their stock — farmers have seen shrimp survival rates soar from 60% to 90%, further boosting their shrimp export capacity.

EY is using Copilot for Microsoft 365 to help clients adopt an AI-powered approach to tackle their unique tax, finance and operational challenges; boost efficiency; and get more value from their data. Reconciling and combining large amounts of data faster and more accurately is a game changer for Finance and Tax, driving a differentiated experience and opportunity to deliver these capabilities through EY’s core platforms and solutions. The ability to apply Copilot to vast swaths of data to develop insights helps drive smarter decision-making across the business. For example, EY professionals are seeing productivity gains of up to 14 hours per week using an AI digital assistant to automate routine tasks, freeing up time for more strategic work. The initial rollout of Copilot was so positive that EY is now scaling it to 150,000 of its employees and helping clients drive their own transformations using EY’s Customer Zero copilot accelerators.

Global design, engineering and environmental services leader GHD is leveraging Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enrich the employee experience and transform its operations to help tackle some of the world’s most complex design and engineering challenges for its clients. GHD employees can now respond to client requests more quickly by using Copilot, reducing the time spent reviewing new requests for proposals from hours to just 15 minutes. More broadly, a recent survey of Copilot users at GHD revealed that 41% are saving time in their workday, with 29% saving more than 30 minutes and 12% saving more than an hour. Additionally, 75% of users feel more efficient and 45% find their work more rewarding when using Copilot.

Hanover Research faced the challenge of efficiently processing vast amounts of data to deliver timely insights to its clients. To tackle this, the custom market research and analytics provider partnered with Neudesic to create the Hanover Intelligent Virtual Engine (HIVE), a customized AI-powered research tool using Azure OpenAI Service that eliminates the need for analysts to manually comb through its vast repository of documents. HIVE helps analysts identify insights up to 10 times faster and creates more opportunities to provide clients with information that would otherwise be buried in data and unavailable. By leveraging Azure AI capabilities to reshape business processes, Hanover has significantly boosted its research efficiency, enabling it to provide more accurate and timely data-driven insights to its clients.

Lumen Technologies was among the first companies to invest broadly in Copilot, making Copilot for Microsoft 365 available last August. Since then, the company has expanded its use of Microsoft Copilot across its organization to empower its people by simplifying workflows and inspiring a forward-thinking mindset. Today, Copilot for Sales is saving its 3,000-plus sellers an average of four hours a week, equating to $50 million annually. Sellers can now spend more time with customers, improve their work-life balance and fundamentally change the way they work.

As an integrated risk assessment firm operating globally, Moody’s Corporation has harnessed the power of AI through Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Teams to significantly enhance productivity and insights. Through our co-innovation efforts, we built an internal tool — Moody’s Copilot — that enables employees to quickly synthesize vast amounts of research and data, and 94% of users reported increased productivity. Additionally, the launch of Moody’s Research Assistant allows customers to generate new insights from extensive credit research, data and analytics, potentially saving users over 25% of their time on typical financial analyst tasks.

OCBC bank is empowering its global workforce with generative AI-powered solutions to boost productivity and enhance customer engagement. Built upon Azure OpenAI, the bank developed a digital assistant for use within a secure and controlled Microsoft Teams environment to help employees in their daily work across customer service, research, product management and marketing roles. Since using the tool, employees have reduced time spent on tasks such as writing, research, translation and ideation by approximately 50%, with 72% of team members reporting significant improvements in their day-to-day productivity and more time to focus on customers.

As one of the largest combined natural gas and electric companies in the U.S., Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) had an ambitious goal to reshape its business processes by automating low-value tasks and rededicating employees to focus on high-value work. By implementing Microsoft Power Platform solutions, its Digital Creators and citizen developers created new business solutions, saving nearly 527,000 hours and generating approximately $75 million in savings annually. Using Microsoft Copilot Studio, the company also built a digital assistant that fulfills 25% to 40% of help desk demands, significantly optimizing agent workloads and providing sizeable labor savings and service-level improvements — saving teams 840 hours and the company more than $1.1 million per year.

As a leading insurance and reinsurance company in Peru — and one of the largest in Latin America — Pacífico Seguros partnered with TC1 Labs and leveraged Microsoft AI, Microsoft 365 and Azure AI solutions to reshape business processes, improve data management and enhance customer interactions. Pacífico Seguros reported a 40% increase in operational efficiency and a 30% reduction in response times to customer inquiries. It also implemented Microsoft Copilot for Security with a Zero Trust approach, drastically boosting responses to cyber threats and delivering ongoing protection of critical systems and data. This AI Transformation has improved service quality and enhanced security across its business.

Paysafe, a leader in specialized payments, supports 260 payment types in more than 40 currencies and enables seamless transactions for businesses and consumers worldwide. By leveraging Copilot for Microsoft 365 the company has transformed its operations to ensure secure and efficient processing across different payment methods. Paysafe uses Copilot to address the challenges of a diverse and multilingual global workforce, using it to translate everything into various languages — document policies, standard operating procedures and meetings — to save both time and money. Compared to preparing documentation from scratch or searching for information manually, Paysafe’s IT team saves between 10% and 50% of their time with Copilot.

Fintech company Saphyre creates real-time client account reconciliation and management solutions for institutional parties involved in financial trading. The company is using Microsoft Azure to provide intelligent, cloud-based solutions that automate and streamline complex financial trading workflows and modernize time-consuming processes efficiently and securely. Using Azure AI, Saphyre built a solution that helped clients reduce manual paperwork by 75%. It is also sharing data more securely using Microsoft security products so clients can be ready to trade three to five times faster compared to manual onboarding. This results in increased revenue opportunities for clients by completing trades more quickly and at better prices.

Softchoice has partnered with Microsoft to help companies drive efficiencies, reinvent customer engagement and address cybersecurity threats. By implementing Copilot for Microsoft 365, Softchoice has achieved significant productivity gains, reducing time spent summarizing technical meetings by 97%, creating internal training modules by 70% and developing customer-facing technical content by 62% to 67%. With Microsoft Copilot for Security built into daily dashboards, the company’s analysts are saving 20% to 30% of their time summarizing pertinent information needed to execute tasks. Analysts can more quickly determine if failed sign-ins are routine or accidental, saving 20-30 minutes each morning and freeing up time to focus on those that require more in-depth analysis. Security incidents can now be audited faster, reducing the time and resources needed to manually review by 50% and improving efficiency by 30% to 40%.

TomTom, a global leader in mapping and navigation technology, faced the challenge of a fragmented development process with too much time spent navigating multiple tools. By centralizing on the GitHub platform and integrating GitHub Copilot into its development processes, TomTom has streamlined workflows to deliver products to customers more quickly than ever. Additionally, 85% of developers report feeling more productive and 70% feel they can focus on more satisfying work by reducing cognitive workloads and enhancing collaboration among development teams.

Australia’s Torrens University set a goal to transform its digital learning environment to deliver a superior online student experience. It developed MyLearn — a modern online platform built with Azure OpenAI Service — to provide a consistent and convenient learning environment for students anytime, anywhere. By leveraging generative AI, the university has standardized and improved course curriculums, saving an impressive 20,000 hours and $2.4 million Australian dollars in time and resources. This AI-driven approach not only streamlined its digital learning environment but also set the stage for future savings and agile curriculum updates, creating a more engaging and efficient educational experience for students.

Unilever, a global leader in consumer products across over 190 countries, is working with Microsoft to revolutionize scientific discovery and positively impact the 3.4 billion people it serves daily. With Copilot and the advanced simulation capabilities of Azure Quantum Elements, Unilever can query scientific information using natural language, performing thousands of computational simulations in the time it would take to run tens of laboratory experiments. This technological leap, combined with its vast repository of proprietary data and a century of expertise in personal and household care, enables Unilever’s scientists to lead the industry in developing the next generation of eco-friendly household and personal products through sustainable product development.

As a leading provider of workplace benefits and services, Unum Group set out to enrich the employee experience by modernizing the manual and time-consuming process of retrieving policy information for inquiries from its client support center. With Azure OpenAI Service, the company developed an application that searches 1.3 terabytes of data with 95% accuracy, cutting response times to four to five seconds and significantly improving efficiency and customer satisfaction. The AI-generated results address 75% of contract-related questions, freeing up employee time for personalized solutions and interactions with clients. Employees trust the tool and feel it has improved their jobs, and now more than 90% of support center employees are using it.

Visma develops and tests software for over 1.8 million customers across Europe and Latin America through its 188 individual companies. Facing high inflation and tight labor markets, it turned to Microsoft AI technologies such as Azure OpenAI Service, Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Search to securely boost efficiency and customer satisfaction across its companies — each with their own customers and domain. Visma developers are using GitHub Copilot to streamline development processes, automate workflows and enhance collaboration. As a result, it has reported up to 50% reduction in development times. GitHub Copilot has also helped Visma developers unleash their creativity and bend the curve on innovation; the company has seen a marked increase in innovation since adopting the solution, even among those who have been working on the same code for 30 years.

Our mission has never been clearer: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We remain committed to democratizing intelligence and unlocking AI opportunities industry by industry in the year ahead by bringing Copilot to life on every device and across every role. We are focused on our co-innovation efforts to identify AI design patterns that will enable our customers and partners to build out their AI innovation environments. We are committed to helping you fortify your cybersecurity foundation by prioritizing security above all else — securing our products by design, by default and within our own operations as part of our Secure Future Initiative. As we continue leading in AI Transformation, we remain rooted in the fact we are at our best when we serve others, and I look forward to what we will accomplish together in the year ahead as your trusted cloud and AI partner.

The post Looking back on FY24: from Copilots empowering human achievement to leading AI Transformation appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

The upcoming European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden is not just an event—it’s a beacon for Microsoft partners who are steering the future of AI and analytics. The conference, set to take place from September 24 to 27, 2024, is a pivotal gathering for those at the forefront of deploying and adopting Microsoft Fabric’s transformative technologies.  

Stockholm, the heart of Scandinavian innovation, is the perfect backdrop for the Fabric Community Conference. Known for its vibrant tech scene and forward-thinking approach, Stockholm embodies the spirit of progress that Microsoft and its partners strive for. 

European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024

A brand-new conference dedicated to Fabric

Register today

What to expect at the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024

Expect to be wowed. You’ll hear from leading Microsoft and community experts from around the world covering topics ranging from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern applications and semantic modeling, to data governance and sustainability, to integrating applications into the Fabric framework. And if that isn’t enough, you’ll get to experience the latest features from Fabric, Power BI, Azure Databases, Azure AI, Microsoft Purview, and more, demonstrating how Fabric serves as a unified platform that empowers both data and business professionals across all industries.   

And as a prelude to the main conference, we invite you to a special Partner Pre-Day—day dedicated to you, our partners, to ensure you’re equipped with the knowledge and connections to thrive. See more details below.

We’ve also planned a few other activities to connect with the community: 

• Partner happy hour: Network with the Fabric leadership and product team. An invaluable opportunity to connect with the team bringing you Fabric.
• One-on-one partner executive connections: Meet with our executives and Fabric partner team to discuss your priorities and needs and gain a better understanding of partner motions and resources.
• Partner-to-partner connection: Connect with other partners to discuss joint business opportunities and share learnings. 

What’s in it for Microsoft partners 

For Microsoft partners, the conference is more than just a learning experience; it represents an amazing chance for partners to forge deeper connections with the minds behind the technology, to engage with customers eager to leverage your expertise to grow their business, and to network with peers and other partners who are equally passionate about driving adoption of these amazing technologies. Are you excited yet? 

And of course, let’s not forget the Partner Pre-Day, an invaluable opportunity for partners to delve into the latest Microsoft partner initiatives, resources, and strategies for focusing on how Microsoft Fabric drives business growth and innovation. 

Here’s a sneak peek into the Partner Pre-Day: 

• Get inspired: Attend Ask Me Anything sessions with top Microsoft data, AI, and analytics leadership and this year’s Partner of the Year Award winners.
• Learn: Gain insights on how best to take advantage of partner-only offerings and incentives, access to resources, and deep technical skilling customized for our Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program ecosystem.
• Share: Meet one-on-one with Microsoft executives and the Microsoft partner team to share what’s on your mind.
• Connect: Forge new relationships and strengthen existing ones with your partner peers for joint business outcomes.  

If you’re as excited about the Fabric Conference in Stockholm as we are, you’ll want to stay connected for all the latest updates. Be sure to follow the event on Microsoft’s partner social media channels on LinkedIn, Fabric YouTube, and the Fabric Tech Community Blog. These platforms are your go-to for live updates, exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and a chance to network with fellow innovators before, during, and after the conference. 

And hey, while you’re at it, why not join the Fabric Partner Community? It’s a fantastic way to get involved with weekly engineering calls where you can dive deep into the tech, ask questions, and share your insights. It’s like having a backstage pass to the world of Microsoft Fabric.

Now let’s make some noise—take these next steps

• Register for the Fabric Conference today. By registering early for the 3-day pass, you can take advantage of an exclusive €200 off discount using the code MSCUST.
• Check out sponsorship opportunities.
• And of course, share this blog post with your network to start those pre-conference discussions online.

Start your Fabric journey today

Check out these additional resources to learn more about Fabric and prepare your organization for the next phase of your Fabric journey. 

• Read this blog to learn how to enable your organization to help customers prepare their data for AI innovation with Microsoft Fabric.
• Check out the new Fabric certification and Fabric Career Hub to get your team upskilled and let customers know you’re Fabric certified.
• Join the Fabric Partner Community on Microsoft Teams, where you can attend the Fabric Engineering Connection (our weekly partner community calls with product engineering), stay connected with other partners, and learn of the latest resources, opportunities, and more.
• Visit Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate to learn more about Azure Innovate, our hero partner offering, and to access resources and funding for customer projects. 

Let’s get the buzz going and show the world what the Microsoft partner community is all about. 

I can’t wait to see you all in Stockholm, Sweden for an unforgettable experience. Let’s innovate, collaborate, and grow together!

Microsoft Fabric

Bring your data into the era of AI

Discover what’s possible

In partnership with Microsoft, the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference is brought to you by the team behind ESPC, Europe’s premier Microsoft 365 Conference and the European Power Platform Conference. 

The post Empowering partnerships: The Microsoft Fabric Conference—your gateway to AI innovation appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Over the past year, we’ve built Microsoft Copilot and released more than 150 updates to it, and we’ve developed the Copilot stack, which takes everything we’ve learned so far and lets developers build their own copilots.

In addition, over the past two years, GitHub Copilot has become the most widely adopted AI developer tool, with 1.8 million paid subscribers.

And just a day ago, we introduced a new category of Copilot+ PCs, the fastest, most AI-ready PCs ever built.

We are the industry leader in AI, and that’s why, as we begin our flagship event for developers, Microsoft Build, there’s one question on everyone’s mind: What’s next?

On Monday, we introduced the world to a new class of Windows PCs, Copilot+ PCs. These devices are designed to allow developers to deliver differentiated AI experiences on the edge, and, together with the great features that we are announcing at Build, make Windows the most open platform for AI and the best place for developers.

At Build, we also are announcing further branches of this technology revolution, including:

• How Microsoft Fabric is helping developers and customers leverage data in motion, or digital information being transported within or between computer systems, to build intelligent apps.
• New frontier models that allow developers to explore multimodal capabilities supporting text, images, video and other types of data in their AI applications, evolving beyond text prompts and completions.
• Partnerships that show how AI can impact the future of myriad industries, including education.
• And how an open and flexible cloud-based platform, built on a foundation of safe and responsible AI, can help developers innovate.

Microsoft Build is always an exciting time for us. About 200,000 people have registered to join us for three days of technical learning and community connection, with 4,000 attending in person in Seattle. Attendees can choose from more than 300 sessions, demos and expert and instructor-led labs from Microsoft and our partners. For those not able to attend the live event, most content will be available on demand. In total, we are announcing about 60 new products and solutions at the event.

With that introduction to Build in mind, let’s explore some of the news and announcements.

In-the-moment decision making with Real-Time Intelligence

For the most efficient AI apps, businesses need to be able to qualify, analyze and organize data at ingestion. This has proven to be a difficult step. The new Real-Time Intelligence within Microsoft Fabric provides an end-to-end Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that empowers customers to act on high-volume, time-sensitive and highly granular data to make faster and more informed business decisions.

Real-Time Intelligence, now in preview, can be helpful for analysts with simple low/no-code experiences, and it also can benefit pro developers with code-rich user interfaces. For example, racing team Dener Motorsport has been using Microsoft Fabric to support real-time analytics, storage and reporting, enabling them to sustain optimal performance and maintain the cars in good repair, which can keep drivers safer. Dener plans to use Real-Time Intelligence as part of their winning strategy to gain insights at ingestion during races.

Building apps requires a level of flexibility, customization and efficiency to make it feasible for developers. The new Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit makes this possible by enabling independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers to extend applications within Fabric, creating a unified user experience.

GitHub Copilot experience leans into extensibility

GitHub is introducing the first set of GitHub Copilot extensions, developed by Microsoft and third-party partners, in private preview. These additions allow developers and organizations to customize their GitHub Copilot experience with their preferred services like Azure, Docker, Sentry and more directly within GitHub Copilot Chat.

GitHub Copilot for Azure, one of the extensions from Microsoft, showcases how building in natural language with a broader range of capabilities can propel development velocity. Using the extension through Copilot Chat, developers can explore and manage Azure resources, while also troubleshooting issues and locating relevant logs and code.

New frontier models and multimodal capabilities in Azure AI

GPT-4o, OpenAI’s newest flagship model, is now available in Azure AI Studio and as an API. This groundbreaking multimodal model integrates text, image and audio processing to set a new standard for generative and conversational AI experiences.

We also announced that Phi-3-vision, a new multimodal model in the Phi-3 family of AI small language models (SLMs) developed by Microsoft, is now available in Azure. Phi-3 models are powerful, cost-effective and optimized for personal devices. Phi-3-vision offers the ability to input images and text and receive text responses. For example, users can ask questions about a chart or ask an open-ended question about specific images.

Developers can experiment with these state-of-the-art frontier models in the Azure AI Playground, and they can start building with and customizing with the models in Azure AI Studio.

Microsoft, Khan Academy using AI to empower educators

Microsoft and Khan Academy are announcing a multi-faceted partnership to turn the transformative potential of AI into reality.

To start, Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy to offer all K-12 U.S. educators free access to Khanmigo for Teachers, an AI-powered teaching assistant that frees up teachers’ time so they can focus on what matters most – engaging with and supporting their students. Microsoft is donating access to Azure AI-optimized infrastructure to increase the availability of Khanmigo for Teachers, which will now be powered by Azure OpenAI Service.

Khan Academy is collaborating with Microsoft to explore opportunities to improve math tutoring in an affordable, scalable and adaptable manner with a new version of Phi-3, a family of SLMs developed by Microsoft. They also plan to bring more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education, expanding resources for learners.

New partnership with Cognition AI

Microsoft and Cognition will bring Cognition’s autonomous AI software agent, Devin, to customers to help them with complex tasks such as code migration and modernization projects. As part of the agreement, Devin will be powered by Azure. Cognition AI is an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents to help developers achieve more.

Powerful new virtual machines help fuel AI adoption

Microsoft has a unique systems approach to AI infrastructure, which includes hardware and software from Microsoft and our partners, all optimized to run AI workloads at scale and fine-tuned for customer needs. We are the first cloud provider to bring AMD’s leading MI300X AI accelerator chip to power customers’ AI training and inferencing needs, with the general availability of the Azure ND MI300X v5 virtual machine series optimized for demanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads like Azure OpenAI Service.

Following the launch of Azure Cobalt 100, Microsoft’s first custom-designed compute processor, the company is announcing a preview of new Cobalt 100 Arm-based virtual machines (VMs), based on the company’s custom silicon series announced in November 2023. Cobalt 100 Arm-based VMs are the first generation of VMs to feature Microsoft’s new Cobalt processor, custom-built on an Arm architecture, and optimized for efficiency and performance when running general-purpose and cloud-native workloads. Customers can expect up to 40% improved performance compared to comparable Azure VMs.

The evolution of Copilot

Copilot has been a game-changer for many people since it was first released. Using modern AI and large language models (LLMs) like Open AI’s GPT-4, copilots across Microsoft products have assisted people with complex tasks, serving as a personal, behind-the-scenes AI assistant.

Now, we are introducing Team Copilot, the expansion of Copilot for Microsoft 365 from a behind-the-scenes, personal AI assistant to a new, valuable member of your team. You will be able to invoke Copilot where you collaborate – in Teams, Loop, Planner and more. Team Copilot can be a meeting facilitator in meetings, managing the agenda, tracking time and taking notes. It can act as a collaborator in chats by surfacing important information, tracking action items and addressing unresolved issues. It can serve as a project manager to help ensure every project runs smoothly and notify the team when their input is needed. These initial experiences, coming in preview later this year, will enable us to learn, iterate and refine as we enter a new phase of innovation where Copilot begins to take more action on behalf of individuals and teams.

Microsoft Copilot Studio is introducing new agent capabilities, empowering developers to build copilots that can proactively respond to data and events, tailored to specific tasks and functions. Copilots built with this new category of capabilities can now independently manage complex, long-running business processes by leveraging memory and knowledge for context, reason over actions and inputs, learn based on user feedback and ask for help when they encounter situations that they don’t know how to handle. Users can now put Copilot to work for them – from IT device procurement to customer concierge for sales and service.

Copilot extensions, including plugins and connectors, allow customers to enhance Microsoft Copilot by connecting it to new data sources and applications, expanding its functionality.

We’re excited about these announcements and all the other updates and features being unveiled at Build. For more information, today you can watch keynotes from Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, Executive Vice President of Experiences and Devices Rajesh Jha and Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott.

On Wednesday, you can watch keynotes from Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI Scott Guthrie and friends. Additionally, you can explore all the news and announcements in the Book of News.

RELATED LINKS:

Watch Microsoft Build keynotes and view photos and videos

Khan Academy and Microsoft announce partnership, Copilot integration

Copilot Studio empowering next wave of copilot experiences

Azure ND MI300X V5 series now generally available

Extend and customize Microsoft Copilot with Copilot extensions

The post What’s next: Microsoft Build continues the evolution and expansion of AI tools for developers appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

With Microsoft Fabric, we are simplifying and future-proofing your data estate with an ever-evolving, AI-powered data analytics platform. Fabric will keep up with the trends for you and seamlessly integrate each new capability so you can spend less time integrating and managing your data estate and more time unlocking value from your data.  

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

Set up Fabric for your business and discover resources that help you take the first steps

Try for free

Aurizon, Australia’s largest rail freight operator, turned to Fabric to modernize their data estate and analytics system.

“With Microsoft Fabric, we’ve answered many of our questions about navigating future growth, to remove legacy systems, and to streamline and simplify our architecture. A trusted data platform sets us up to undertake complex predictive analytics and optimizations that will give greater surety for our business and drive commercial benefits for Aurizon and our customers in the very near future.”

—Tammy Wigg, Chief Data Analytics Officer at Aurizon

Aurizon is just one among thousands of customers who have already used Fabric to revolutionize how they connect to and analyze their data. In fact, a 2024 commissioned Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that Microsoft Fabric customers saw a three-year 379% return on investment (ROI) with a payback period of less than six months. We are thrilled to share a huge range of new capabilities coming to Fabric. These innovations will help you more effectively uncover insights and keep you at the forefront of the trends in data and analytics. Check out a quick overview of the biggest changes coming to Fabric.

Fabric is a complete data platform

Fabric is a complete data platform—giving your data teams the ability to unify, transform, analyze, and unlock value from data from a single, integrated software as a service (SaaS) experience. We are excited to announce additions to the Fabric workloads that will make Fabric’s capabilities even more robust and even customizable to meet the unique needs of each organization. These enhancements include: 

1. A completely redesigned workload, Real-Time Intelligence, that brings together and enhances Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator to help you analyze and act on high-volume, high-granular event streaming data and even explore your organization’s real-time data in the new Real-time hub.

2. New tools like the Fabric Workload Development Kit, Application Programming Interface (API) for GraphQL™, and “user data functions” that can help developers build powerful solutions on the Fabric platform. 

3. A new feature in the Microsoft Azure Data Factory experience called Data workflow, powered by Apache Airflow runtime, that can help you author, schedule, and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python. 

Unlock continuous insights with Real-Time Intelligence and the Real-time hub

When we introduced Fabric, it launched with seven core workloads which included Synapse Real-time Analytics for data streaming analysis and Data Activator for monitoring and triggering actions in real-time. We are unveiling an enhanced workload called Real-Time Intelligence that combines these workloads and brings an array of additional new features, in preview, to help organizations make better decisions with up-to-the-minute insights. From ingestion to transformation, querying, and taking immediate action, Real-Time Intelligence is an end-to-end experience that enables seamless handling of real-time data without the need to land it first. With Real-Time Intelligence, you can ingest streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger actions like alerting a production manager when equipment is overheating or rerunning jobs when data pipelines fail. And with both simple, low-code or no-code, and powerful, code-rich interfaces, Real-Time Intelligence empowers every user to work with real-time data. 

Behind this powerful workload is the Real-time hub, a single place to discover, manage, and use event streaming data from Fabric and other data sources from Microsoft, third-party cloud providers, and other external data sources. Just like the OneLake data hub makes it easy to discover, manage, and use the data at rest, the Real-time hub can help you do the same for data in motion. All events that flow through the Real-time hub can be easily transformed and routed to any Fabric data store and users can create new streams that can be discovered and consumed. From the Real-time hub, users can gain insights through the data profile, configure the right level of endorsement, set alerts on changing conditions and more, all without leaving the hub. While the existing Real-Time Analytics capabilities are still generally available, the Real-time hub and the other new capabilities coming to the Real-Time Intelligence workload are currently in preview. Watch this demo video to check out the redesigned Real-Time Intelligence experience:  

Elcome, one of the world’s largest marine electronics companies, built a new service on Fabric called “Welcome” that helps maritime crews stay connected to their families and friends.

Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence has been the essential building block that’s enabled us to monitor, manage, and enhance the services we provide. With the help of the Real-time hub for centrally managing data in motion from our diverse sources and Data Activator for event-based triggers, Fabric’s end-to-end cloud solution has empowered us to easily understand and act on high-volume, high-granularity events in real-time with fewer resources.”

—Jimmy Grewal, Managing Director of Elcome

Real-time insights are becoming increasingly critical across industries like route optimization in transportation and logistics, grid monitoring in energy and utilities, predictive maintenance in manufacturing, and inventory management in retail. And since Real-Time Intelligence comes fully optimized and integrated in a SaaS platform, adoption is seamless. Strathan Campbell, Channel Environment Technology Lead at One NZ—the largest mobile carrier in New Zealand—said they “…went from a concept to a delivered product in just two weeks.” To learn more about the Real-Time Intelligence workload, watch the “Ingest, analyze and act in real time with Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session or read the Real-Time Intelligence blog.  

Extend Fabric with your own, custom workloads and experiences

Fabric was built from the ground up to be extensible, customizable, and open. Now, we are making it even easier for software developers and customers to design, build, and interoperate applications within Fabric with the new Fabric Workload Development Kit—currently in preview. Applications built with this kit will appear as a native workload within Fabric, providing a consistent experience for users directly in their Fabric environment without any manual effort. Software developers can publish and monetize their custom workloads through Azure Marketplace. And, coming soon, we are creating a workload hub experience in Fabric where users can discover, add, and manage these workloads without ever leaving the Fabric environment. We already have industry-leading partners building on Fabric including SAS, Esri, Informatica, Teradata, and Neo4j.

You can also learn more about the Workload Development Kit by watching the “Extend and enhance your analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session.

We are also excited to announce two new features, both in preview, created with developers in mind: API for GraphQL and user data functions in Fabric. API for GraphQL is a flexible and powerful RESTful API that allows data professionals to access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. With API for GraphQL, you can streamline requests to reduce network overheads and accelerate response rates. User data functions are user-defined functions built for Fabric experiences across all data services, such as notebooks, pipelines, or event streams. These features enable developers to build experiences and applications using Fabric data sources more easily like lakehouses, data warehouses, mirrored databases, and more with native code ability, custom logic, and seamless integration. You can watch these features in action in the “Introducing API for GraphQL and User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session.

You can also learn more about the Workload Development Kit, the API for GraphQL, user data functions, and more by reading the Integrating ISV apps with Microsoft Fabric blog.

Orchestrate complex data workflows in the Fabric Data Factory workload

We are also announcing the preview of Data workflows in Fabric as part of the Data Factory experience. Data workflows allow customers to define Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) files for complex data workflow orchestration in Fabric. Data workflows is powered by the Apache Airflow runtime and designed to help you author, schedule and monitor workflows or data pipelines using python. Learn more by reading the data workflows blog.  

Fabric is lake-centric and open

The typical data estate has grown organically over time to span multiple clouds, accounts, databases, domains, and engines with a multitude of vendors and specialized services. OneLake, Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake built to span an entire organization, can connect to data from across your data estate and reduce data duplication and sprawl.  

We are excited to announce the expansion of OneLake shortcuts to connect to data from on-premises and network-restricted data sources beyond just Azure Data Lake Service Gen2, now in preview. With an on-premises data gateway, you can now create shortcuts to Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, and S3 compatible storage buckets that are either on-premises or otherwise network-restricted. To learn more about these announcements, watch the Microsoft Build session “Unify your data with OneLake and Microsoft Fabric.”  

Empower business users with Fabric

Insights drive impact only when they reach those who can use them to inform actions and decisions. Professional and citizen analysts bridge the gap between data and business results, and with Fabric, they have the tools to quickly manage, analyze, visualize, and uncover insights that can be shared with the entire organization. We are excited to help analysts work even faster and more effectively by releasing the model explorer and the DAX query view in Microsoft Power BI Desktop into general availability.

The model explorer in Microsoft Power BI provides a rich view of all the semantic model objects in the data pane—helping you find items in your data fast. You can also use the model explorer to create calculation groups and reduce the number of measures by reusing calculation logic and simplifying semantic model consumption. 

The DAX query view in Power BI Desktop lets users discover, analyze, and see the data in their semantic model using the DAX query language. Users working with a model can validate data and measures without having to build a visual or use an additional tool—similar to the Explore feature. Changes made to measures can be seamlessly updated directly back to the semantic model. 

To learn more about these announcements and others coming to Power BI, check out the Power BI blog.  

Fabric is AI-powered

When ChatGPT was launched, it had over 100 million users in just over two months—the steepest adoption curve in the history of technology.¹ It’s been a year and a half since that launch, and organizations are still trying to translate the benefit of generative AI from novelty to actual business results. By infusing generative AI into every layer of Fabric, we can empower your data professionals to employ its benefits, in the right context and in the right scenario to get more done, faster.  

Use Copilot in Fabric, now generally available 

Copilot in Fabric was designed to help users unlock the full potential of their data by assisting data professionals to be more productive and business users to explore their data more easily. With Copilot in Fabric, you can use conversational language to create dataflows, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results. We are excited to share that Copilot in Fabric is now generally available, starting with the Power BI experience. This includes the ability to create stunning reports and summarize your insights into narrative summaries in seconds. Copilot in Fabric is also now enabled on-by-default for all eligible tenants including Copilot in Fabric experiences for Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehouse, and Real-Time Intelligence, which are all still in preview. The general availability of Copilot in Fabric for the Power BI experience will be rolling out over the coming weeks to all customers with Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) or Fabric capacity (F64 or higher). 

We are also thrilled to announce a new Copilot in Fabric experience for Real-Time Intelligence, currently in preview, that enables users to explore real-time data with ease. Starting with a Kusto Query Language (KQL) Queryset connected to a KQL Database in an Eventhouse or a standalone Azure Data Explorer database, you can type your question in conversational language and Copilot will automatically translate it to a KQL query you can execute. This experience is especially powerful for users less familiar with writing KQL queries but still want to get the most from their time-series data stored in Eventhouse. 

Create custom Q&A experiences with your data with AI skills 

We are also thrilled to release a new AI capability in preview called AI skills—an innovative experience designed to provide any user with a conversational Q&A experience about their data. AI skills allow you to simply select the data source in Fabric you want to explore and immediately start asking questions about your data—even without any configuration. When answering questions, the generative AI experience will show the query it generated to find the answer and you can enhance the Q&A experience by adding more tables, setting additional context, and configuring settings. AI skills can empower everyone to explore data, build and configure AI experiences, and get the answers and insights they need.  

AI skills will honor existing security permissions and can be configured to respect the unique language and nuances of your organization, ensuring that responses are not just data-driven but steeped in the context of your business operations. And, coming soon, it can also enrich the creation of new copilots in Microsoft Copilot Studio and be interacted with from Copilot for Microsoft for 365. It’s about making your data not just accessible but approachable, inviting users to explore insights through natural dialogue, and shortening the time to insight.

New partnerships with Microsoft Fabric

Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric

With the launch of Fabric, we’ve committed to open data formats, standards, and interoperability with our partners to give our customers the flexibility to do what makes sense for their business. We are taking this commitment a step further by expanding our existing partnership with Snowflake to expand interoperability between Snowflake and Fabric’s OneLake. We are excited to announce future support for Apache Iceberg in Fabric OneLake and bi-directional data access between Snowflake and Fabric. This integration will enable users to analyze their Fabric and Snowflake data written in Iceberg format in any engine within either platform, and access data across apps like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Azure AI Studio.

With the upcoming availability of shortcuts for Iceberg in OneLake, Fabric users will be able to access all data sources in Iceberg format, including the Iceberg sources from Snowflake, and translate metadata between Iceberg and Delta formats. This means you can work with a single copy of your data across Snowflake and Fabric. Since all the OneLake data can be accessed in Snowflake as well as in Fabric, this integration will enable you to spend less time stitching together applications and your data estate, and more time uncovering insights. To learn more about this announcement, read the Fabric and Snowflake partnership blog.

Adobe and Microsoft Fabric 

We are also excited to announce we are expanding our existing relationship with Adobe. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Adobe Campaign will have the ability to federate enterprise data from Fabric. Our joint customers will soon have the capability to connect to Fabric and use the Fabric Data Warehouse for query federation to create and enrich audiences for engagement, without having to transfer or extract the data from Fabric. 

Combine Fabric and Microsoft Azure Databricks to get the best of both worlds

We are excited to announce that we are expanding the integration between Fabric and Azure Databricks—allowing you to have a truly unified experience across both products and pick the right tools for any scenario. 

Azure Databricks Unity Catalog integration with Fabric 

Coming soon, you will be able to access Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly in Fabric, making it even easier to unify Azure Databricks with Fabric. From the Fabric portal, you can create and configure a new Azure Databricks Unity Catalog item in Fabric with just a few clicks. You can add a full catalog, a schema, or even individual tables to link and the management of this Azure Databricks item in OneLake—a shortcut connected to Unity Catalog—is automatically taken care of for you.  

This data acts like any other data in OneLake—you can write SQL queries or use it with any other workloads in Fabric including Power BI through Direct Lake mode. When the data is modified or tables are added, removed, or renamed in Azure Databricks, the data in Fabric will remain always in sync. This new integration makes it simple to unify Azure Databricks data in Fabric and seamlessly use it across every Fabric workload. 

Federate OneLake as a Remote Catalog in Azure Databricks 

Also coming soon, Fabric users will be able to access Fabric data items like lakehouses as a catalog in Azure Databricks. While the data remains in OneLake, you can access and view data lineage and other metadata in Azure Databricks and leverage the full power of Unity Catalog. This includes extending Unity Catalog’s unified governance over data and AI into Azure Databricks Mosaic AI. In total, you will be able to combine this data with other native and federated data in Azure Databricks, perform analysis assisted by generative AI, and publish the aggregated data back to Power BI—making this integration complete across the entire data and AI lifecycle. 

Watch these announcements in action at Microsoft Build 2024

Join us at Microsoft Build from May 21 to 23, 2024 to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions: 

• “Microsoft Build opening keynote” with Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott, and Rajesh Jha.

• “Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud” with Scott Guthrie.

• “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” with Arun Ulagaratchagan and Amir Netz.

• “Ingest, analyze and act in real time with Microsoft Fabric” with Yitzhak Kesselman and Tessa Kloster.

• “Extend and enhance your analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric” with Dipti Borkar and Teddy Bercovitz.

• Introducing API for GraphQL and User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric” with Monica Boris and Dipti Borkar.

• “Unify your data with OneLake and Microsoft Fabric” with Josh Caplan and Charles Webb.

• “Accelerate insights with real-time Azure SQL Data and Microsoft Fabric” with Anna Hoffman and Bob Ward.
• “Intergrating Azure AI and Microsoft Fabric for Next-Gen AI Solutions” with Nellie Gustafsson and Facundo Santiago.
• “Activate enterprise data in AI-enabled business applications” with Rakesh Krishnan and Srikumar Nair.

You can also try out these new capabilities and everything Fabric has to offer yourself by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no credit card information required. To start your free trial, sign up for a free account (Power BI customers can use their existing account), and once signed in, select start trial within the account manager tool in the Fabric app. Existing Power BI Premium customers can already access Fabric by simply turning on Fabric in their Fabric admin portal. Learn more on the Fabric get started page. 

Join us at the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 

We are excited to announce a European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference that will be held in Stockholm, Sweden from September 23 to 26, 2024. You can see firsthand how Fabric and the rest of the data and AI products at Microsoft can help your organization prepare for the era of AI. You will hear from leading Microsoft and community experts from around the world and get hands on experiences with the latest features from Fabric, Power BI, Azure Databases, Azure AI, Microsoft Purview, and more. You will also have the opportunity to learn from top data experts and AI leaders while having the chance to interact with your peers and share your story. We hope you will join us and see how cutting-edge technologies from Microsoft can enable your business success with the power of Fabric.   

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric: 

• Sign up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• View the updated Microsoft Fabric Roadmap.
• Visit the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read about other Azure announcements:  

• • From code to production: New ways Azure helps your build transformational AI experiences.

• • Unleashing innovation: The new era of compute powering Azure AI solutions.

• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
• Read the new Microsoft Fabric security whitepaper.
• Watch the Real-Time Intelligence Microsoft Mechanics video.
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

Microsoft Fabric

Experience the next generation in analytics 

Explore capabilities

¹ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base – analyst note, Reuters.

The post Unlock real-time insights with AI-powered analytics in Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Just this week we announced our strategic partnership with The Coca-Cola Company to accelerate AI Transformation enterprise-wide as well as across its global network of independent bottlers, and shared news of our partnership with Cognizant to drive enterprise AI adoption for millions of users. We are expanding our work with G42 to accelerate responsible AI innovation in the United Arab Emirates and beyond while accelerating digital transformation securely across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa with expanded access to services and technologies. We are also building on our relationship with Cloud Software Group to bring joint cloud solutions and generative AI capabilities to more than 100 million people.

We continue to shape the future of industry alongside our customers to help them differentiate their businesses. At CES, we showcased how our customers and partners are innovating across the automotive and mobility industry with generative AI to solve deep business problems and create new opportunities, and revealed the Copilot key for Windows 11 PCs. At NRF, we shared new copilot templates to help retailers incorporate generative AI across the shopper journey while enhancing the experience for store associates and making AI implementation more accessible. Just recently at HIMSS, we announced Microsoft’s role as the technology enabling partner for the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network, a consortium of healthcare leaders aimed at operationalizing responsible AI principles to improve the quality, safety and trustworthiness of AI in healthcare.

Enabling pragmatic AI innovation with Copilot capabilities to deliver immediate value

Companies like Amadeus, AAMI, TotalEnergies and Cushman & Wakefield are leveraging Copilot for Microsoft 365 to enrich customer interactions and advance high-priority projects. Visa employees are transforming how they work to better serve the needs of their clients and Banca Transilvania is boosting efficiency and innovation while delivering the highest quality of customer service. Emirates NBD engineers are solving their most complex problems while remaining within their development environments, and 96% of early adopters at CommBank have shared that Copilot is making them more productive. Colombia-based Cenit is experiencing rapid adoption of Copilot to empower employees to be more creative, productive and collaborative. U.K.-based law firm Clifford Chance is helping employees automate daily tasks like meeting notes, email drafts and inbox management with AI and natural language processing, while Air India built a plugin to gain real-time access to flight and operations data to empower better decision-making.

With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Northrop & Johnson achieved a 250% increase in charter bookings while helping team members save time, boost productivity and enrich the quality of engagement with their customers. Using Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio, Cineplex is saving employees over 30,000 hours annually in manual processing times and reducing ticket refund handling time from 15 minutes to under a minute. Northern Trust is using Microsoft Copilot for Service to modernize its client relations organization, streamline employee processes and elevate the client experience. Teams at EPAM Systems are leveraging Microsoft Copilot for Sales to improve sales processes and better support its business strategies, while freeing up time to spend with customers.

Building AI design patterns that bend the curve on innovation and intelligently reason over data to solve business challenges

Icertis is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service and its proprietary AI models in conjunction with its extensive data lake to uncover cost savings, enhance compliance and reduce risk across millions of legal contracts. Insurance company FWD Group is using the service to enhance customer experiences and operations across its lines of business, and Singapore-based CapitaLand Investment has saved 1 million Singapore dollars and 10,000 work hours per year with data-driven AI models. With Azure OpenAI Service as the secure foundation for its supply chain platform, Blue Yonder is harnessing AI and machine learning to provide real-time decision making for businesses across 78 countries. Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy and Publicis Sapient are making it easier for travelers to find the right vacation homes through natural language search powered by large language models within Azure OpenAI Service, and Miral is curating some of the most sought-after leisure, entertainment and tourism activities with a 24/7 AI-powered concierge. Using several AI models, Australian retailer Coles developed an edge computing platform that makes 1.6 billion informed predictions each day so customers can find exactly what they are looking for across its 850 stores.

With Microsoft Fabric, Melbourne Airport is synchronizing flight bookings and ground transportation data to project demand while maintaining efficiency, reliability and safety of its operations. Rail freight operator Aurizon is deriving better data insights from 400 sensor-equipped locomotives to enhance cost efficiency, scalability and predictive maintenance. Seair Exim Solutions is increasing export-import trade data ingestion speeds by 90% to empower its global shipping industry customers with improved insights more quickly with help from Mandelbulb Technologies, while Dener Motorsport is using Fabric and real-time analytics to help automotive engineers detect and resolve car issues within minutes — down from nearly half an hour. By hosting its data within Azure Kubernetes, Windstream is improving its custom GPT platform to help employees find the information they need faster across 100,000 indexed documents. To promote financial inclusion, Trusting Social focused on a strong data foundation paired with AI services to enable the development and deployment of solutions that assist more than 130 financial institutions across Asia. Sasfin Bank worked with Legal Interact to implement a unified document management system to analyze contract clauses and streamline legal operations and workflows using Azure Cognitive Services and Azure SQL. TomTom has deployed GitHub Copilot to its developers, resulting in 85% of the company’s engineers feeling more productive and 70% saying it enables them to focus on more satisfying work. Meesho — a leading online marketplace in India — is using a generative AI chat agent to increase inquiry resolution by 40% and customer satisfaction by 25%, while leveraging GitHub Copilot to streamline code delivery and testing for its 200+ developers.

Strengthening cybersecurity foundations with industry-leading cloud and responsible AI solutions

Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative (SFI) reflects our commitment to continually advancing the built-in security of our products and services. We recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Copilot for Security — the industry’s first generative AI solution designed to help security and IT professionals do their work with greater speed and accuracy. In our latest Copilot for Security economic study, security analysts using the Copilot were 22% faster and 7% more accurate across all tasks, with 97% saying they want to use it again. Our ability to offer this solution to customers is bolstered by more than 100 partners such as Capgemini, Cisco and Darktrace who are committed to working with us to deliver trusted, responsible AI solutions. In collaboration with TC1 Labs, Pacifico Seguros has become the first company in Latin America to implement Copilot for Security with a Zero Trust approach, strengthening its security defenses and confidently preparing the company for future security challenges. Security professionals at Enverus are saving hours per day on low-value tasks with Copilot, allowing them to focus on strategic work and help elevate the impact of their security team. Wipro is using the solution to help employees save time and act quickly to improve outcomes across its business.

Using the Microsoft Defender security stack, Del Monte Foods increased security visibility and coverage across its IT environment, reducing security risks by 50% and improving its security response and remediation capabilities. To streamline its security operations, Jones Lang LaSalle implemented Microsoft Defender for Endpoint with help from Tanium, reducing cybersecurity spending by 20% and enhancing protection for nearly 90,000 endpoints. Türkiye-based Demirören has adopted a Zero Trust security model by unifying its security solutions to protect essential business data and enhance threat detection and response capabilities. Paytronix, a provider of customized digital experiences for restaurant and convenience store guests, improved its security profile by seamlessly migrating data for 250 million user accounts to Azure without interruption. The Audi Group’s IT department is simplifying endpoint management and safeguarding its hybrid workforce across 12 countries with enhanced security using Microsoft Intune. To ensure robust data protection and seamless access for authorized personnel, SLT-MOBITEL is using Microsoft’s AI-powered security products to fortify end-user devices and services while simplifying information security and compliance. Oregon State University and Grupo Bimbo are utilizing Microsoft data security solutions to safeguard their environments and confidently prepare for their continued adoption and deployment of AI.

Embracing AI Transformation has become a priority for organizations around the world seeking to unlock AI opportunities. Whether helping our customers adopt and scale AI with our Copilot capabilities or building unique AI strategies leveraging our open platform and partner ecosystem, we are humbled to work with you to drive pragmatic business outcomes and differentiated industry leadership. Our commitment to your success is unwavering. We will continue building upon our trusted relationships and our focus on responsibility and security so you can move forward with confidence in your AI journey. I remain inspired by what we have done — and what we will do — to help our customers and partners achieve more.

The post Leading in the era of AI: How Microsoft’s platform differentiation and Copilot empowerment are driving AI Transformation appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is our solution to help you create a powerful, agile, and secure data and AI foundation, made simple. Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is a suite of technologies with Microsoft Fabric at its heart that helps organizations harness the full power of their data. By natively integrating products across four workloads—AI, analytics, database, and security—organizations no longer have to bear the cost and burden of stitching together a complex set of disconnected services from multiple vendors themselves. Instead, focusing on making bold, real-time decisions and empowering teams to create and innovate without limits. Learn more about the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform and how Microsoft Fabric fits in by reading Jessica Hawk’s blog “The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform: unleash your data to accelerate transformation.”

Many of our customers are already taking advantage of our focus on integration to accelerate their time to insight and empower more people to make data-backed decisions. For example, One NZ, one of the largest mobile carriers in New Zealand, wanted to provide nearly 1,000 users with a real-time, tailored view of customer data to provide more tailored and timely customer service. But as Strathan Campbell, Channel Environment Technology Lead at One NZ explains, “Our increasing data volumes started leading to delayed refresh rates in what should have been real-time Power BI dashboards.” They turned to Microsoft Fabric and in particular, Fabric’s real-time analytics capabilities to provide a seamless and easy-to-manage solution.

“What drew us to [Fabric] was that it was an all-in-one solution. Since we didn’t need to buy new components and were already embedded with Power BI, putting the architecture and security in place was quick and easy. Most dashboards are updated every 10 seconds now, which is six times faster than before.”

—Steven Easton, BI Channels Specialist at One NZ

Learn more about One NZ’s journey.

Microsoft Fabric

Bring your data into the era of AI

Try today

Join the thriving Microsoft Fabric community 

It’s been fantastic meeting so many of our most active community members at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference this week. We launched Microsoft Fabric 10 months ago at Microsoft Build—a reimagining of analytics with a single, SaaS platform that could tackle every step of the analytics process, all on a multi-cloud data lake foundation. We were thrilled by the excitement across the millions of active Power BI, Data Factory, and Synapse community members who came together to answer thousands of questions, post ideas, join user groups, and help each other along their data journeys. Your feedback has helped us create and refine so much of what makes Microsoft Fabric great. Thank you all for your ideas and constant support. 

We have created new resources to help you ramp up on Microsoft Fabric and advance your career. First, visit the new Fabric Career Hub, to access a comprehensive learning journey with free on-demand and live training, discounts on certification exams, career insights from community experts, and role guidance to understand how Fabric can open potential opportunities. You can also join the vibrant Fabric Community today and engage with a huge community of data professionals to get help when you’re stuck, learn from peers, showcase your work, and even suggest product improvements. 

We’ve also published an enhanced portfolio of Microsoft Credentials, including the new “Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate” certification, along with several new Microsoft Applied Skills covering scenarios using Microsoft Fabric, like implementing lakehouses, data warehouses, real-time analytics and data science solutions—with more coming out over the next few months. Check them all out on the Microsoft Credentials homepage.

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric 

We have been working tirelessly over the past year to create the richest and most intuitive analytics platform on the market. We are thrilled to share the latest in a long line of innovation that is helping us fulfill the four core promises of Fabric:

1. Fabric is a complete platform
2. Fabric is lake-centric and open
3. Fabric can empower every business user
4. Fabric is AI powered

Fabric is a complete platform

Our first promise is that Fabric is a complete analytics platform with every tool your data scientists, data engineers, data warehousing professionals, analysts, and business users need to unlock value from data in a single unified SaaS platform. It also has the end-to-end, industry-leading security, governance, and data management capabilities needed to protect and manage your data. Let‘s take a look at the latest enhancements to the Fabric platform: 

Over the past few months, we have made significant updates to our platform to help you tackle projects of any scale and complexity. First, we are transforming Microsoft Fabric’s CI/CD experience. This transformation includes support for data pipelines and data warehouses in Fabric Git integration and deployment pipelines. Spark job definition and Spark environment will become available in Git integration. We are also giving you the ability to easily branch out a workspace integrated into Git with just a couple of clicks to help you reduce the time to code. Additionally, because many organizations already have robust CI/CD processes established in tools such as Azure DevOps, we will also support both Fabric Git integration APIs as well as Fabric deployment pipelines APIs, enabling you to integrate Fabric into these familiar CI/CD tools. All of these updates will be launched in a preview experience in early April.

Second, we are significantly updating our dataflows and data pipeline experience in Fabric to help customers more quickly ingest and transform their data. With Fast Copy in Dataflows Gen2, you can ingest a large amount of data using the same data movement backend as the “copy” activity in data pipelines. For data pipelines, you can now access on-premises data using the on-premises Data Gateway—the same gateway used with dataflows. We are also excited to add a new activity, semantic model refresh, that enables you to use Data Factory to orchestrate the refresh of semantic models in Microsoft Fabric. Finally, we are doubling the number of activities supported in a data pipeline from forty to eighty. All of these updates are now in preview and you can try them today. 

We have also listened to your feedback over the past few months and added some highly requested features to make working in Fabric even easier. We’ve released the ability to create folders in your workspaces, now in preview, and we are announcing the ability to create multiple apps in the same workspace, coming soon. We are also excited to share a feature coming soon that will give you the ability to add tags to Fabric items and manage them for enhanced compliance, discoverability, and reuse. Finally, we want to show you a sneak peek of a new feature we are bringing to Microsoft Fabric called task flows. Task flows can help you visualize a data project from end-to-end: 

Security in Microsoft Fabric 

With all your data flowing into the same platform, you need to be certain that data is secure at every step of the analytics journey. With that in mind, we have released a number of enterprise security features that can better protect your data. We recently announced the preview of Azure Private Link support for Microsoft Fabric which can provide secure access to your sensitive data in Microsoft Fabric by providing network isolation and applying required controls on your inbound network traffic. We also announced the preview of Trusted Workspace Access and Managed Private Endpoints which allow secure connections from Microsoft Fabric to data sources that are behind a firewall or not accessible from the public internet. Similarly, we released VNET data gateway into general availability in February which lets you connect your Azure and other data services to Microsoft Fabric and the Power Platform while ensuring no traffic is exposed to a public endpoint. We are thrilled to announce the expansion of these VNET data gateway to include on-premise data behind a VNET—now generally available.

We are also announcing deeper integration with Microsoft Purview’s industry-leading data security and compliance offerings to help you seamlessly secure data across your data estate. First, we are excited to announce that security admins will soon be able to define Purview Information Protection policies in Microsoft Fabric to automatically enforce access permissions to sensitive information in Fabric. Also coming soon is the extension of Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to Fabric, enabling security teams to automatically identify the upload of sensitive information to Fabric and trigger automatic risk remediation actions. The DLP policies will initially work with Fabric Lakehouses with support for other Fabric workloads to follow. Finally, we are thrilled to announce the upcoming integration with Purview Insider Risk Management which will help you detect, investigate, and act on malicious and inadvertent data oversharing activities in your organization. Learn more about all of these upcoming integrations in the latest Microsoft Purview blog.

Governing data in Microsoft Fabric

With the massive growth in the volume of data, organizations are increasingly moving towards federated governance models where data is governed and managed according to the line of business needs. That is why, when we launched Fabric, we included the ability to create domains which allow tenant admins to delegate control to the domain level, enabling each business department to define its own rules and restrictions according to its specific business need. We have listened to your requests and have added, in preview, the ability for organizations to create subdomains to further refine the way your Fabric data estate is structured. Moreover, we are making it easier to create and manage domains with the ability to set default domains for security groups, the ability to use public admin APIs, and more. Learn more here.

To complement and extend the built-in data governance capability within Microsoft Fabric, we also natively integrate with the Microsoft Purview Data Governance solution. Today, Microsoft is announcing a reimagined data governance experience that offers sophisticated yet simple business-friendly interaction for your multi-cloud, multi-source data estate governance practice. Informed by Microsoft’s own internal journey, this reimagined experience is purpose-built for federated data governance that offers efficient data curation, data quality, and data management backed by actionable insights that help you activate and nurture your governance practice. Microsoft Fabric’s built-in governance, like item inventory, data lineage and metadata are reflected in Purview to accelerate your multi-cloud data estate governance practice.  Learn more about the new Microsoft Purview experience by reading the latest blog.  

Fabric is lake-centric and open

Our second promise was to design Fabric to be lake-centric and open to help you establish a trusted data foundation for your entire data estate. With OneLake, you can connect data from anywhere into a single, multi-cloud data lake for the entire organization, and work from the same copy of data across analytics engines. Two key features in OneLake, Shortcuts, and Mirroring, simplify how you bring data into OneLake.  

Shortcuts enable your data teams to virtualize data in OneLake without moving or duplicating the data. We are thrilled to release the preview of shortcuts to the Google Cloud Platform. We are also announcing the ability to create shortcuts to cloud-based S3 compatible data sources, in preview, and on-premise S3 compatible data sources, coming soon. These sources include Cloudflare, Qumulo, MinIO, Dell ECS, and many more.

Last November, we shared a new, zero-ETL way of accessing and ingesting data seamlessly in near-real time from any database or data warehouse into the Data Warehousing experience in Fabric called Mirroring. We are thrilled to announce that Mirroring is now in preview, enabling Azure Cosmos Database, Azure SQL Database, and other database customers to mirror their data in OneLake and unlock all the capabilities of Fabric Data Warehouse, Direct Lake mode, notebooks, and much more. We are also offering a free terabyte of Mirroring storage for replicas for every capacity unit (CU) you have purchased and provisioned. For example, if you purchase F64, you will get sixty-four free terabytes worth of storage for your mirrored replicas. Learn more about these announcements by reading this blog. 

Finally, we are introducing an external data-sharing experience for Microsoft Fabric data and artifacts, helping make collaboration easier and more fruitful across organizations. Fabric external data sharing, coming soon, enables you to share data and assets with external organizations such as business partners, customers, and vendors in an easy, quick, and secure manner. Because this experience is built on top of OneLake’s shortcut capabilities, you can share data in place from OneLake storage locations without copying the data. External users can access it in their Fabric tenant, combine it with their data, and work with it across any Fabric experience and engine.

Fabric can empower every business user

The third promise we made was to empower every business user with approachable tools in Fabric to help turn data and insights into better decisions and more innovation. Power BI has been on the leading edge of helping every user access, explore, and take advantage of data with an intuitive interface and deep integration into the apps people use every day.

As part of our commitment to empowering every user, we are adding enhancements to the core Power BI visuals including more layout options for the matrix visual, additional formatting options for all cartesian charts, and new visual types like the button slicer and the new 100% stacked line area chart.

We are also introducing a metrics layer, in Fabric, coming soon, which allows organizations to create standardized business metrics, that are rooted in measures and are discoverable and intended for reuse. Trusted creators can select Power BI measures to promote to metrics and even, include descriptions, dimensions, and other metadata to help users better understand how they should be applied and interpreted. When looking through the metrics, users can preview and explore the simplified semantic model in a simple UI before using it in their solution. These metrics can not only be used in reports, scorecards, and Power BI solutions but also in other artifacts across Fabric, such as data science notebooks. 

We are also making it easier to connect to your data no matter where you are working. Later in the year, we will release the ability to live edit Direct Lake semantic models in the Fabric service right from Power BI Desktop, so you can work with data directly from OneLake. We are also enabling you to connect to over a hundred data sources and create paginated reports right from the Power BI Report Builder, now in preview. Also in preview is the new ability to create Power BI reports in the Fabric web service by simply connecting to your Excel and CSV files with relationship detection enabled. And to save you time when you are building reports, we have created new visuals for calculations we are introducing a new way for you to create and edit a custom date table without writing any Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) formulas, both in preview. Finally, you can generate mobile-optimized layouts for any report page, in preview, to help everyone view insights even on the go.

Fabric is AI-powered

Our fourth and final promise was to infuse generative AI capabilities into every layer of Fabric to help data teams accelerate their projects and focus on higher-value activities. With Copilot in Fabric, we are realizing that promise. The experiences currently in preview are already helping professionals go from raw data to insights in minutes. 

I am excited to share two important updates coming to Copilot in Fabric. In November, we announced a new feature called Explore that can help users learn more about their semantic model without building a report. We also announced another new feature called the DAX query view that helps you analyze and build your semantic model by running DAX queries. I’m excited to share we are making both of these capabilities even more powerful with Copilot. In Explore, we’ve added a new “Data overview” button which provides a summary, powered by Copilot, of the semantic model to help users get started. This feature will be released in preview in early April and will roll out to regions gradually. We are also adding the ability for Copilot to help you write and explain DAX queries in the DAX query view—now in preview.

Finally, we wanted to share a sneak peek of a new generative AI feature in Fabric that will enable custom Q&A experiences for your data. You can simply select the data source in Fabric you want to explore and immediately start asking questions about your data—even without any configuration. When answering questions, the generative AI experience will show the query it generated to find the answer and you can enhance the Q&A experience by adding more tables, setting additional context, and configuring settings. Data professionals can use this experience to learn more about their data or it could even be embedded into apps for business users to query.

Join us at Microsoft Build 

These announcements represent just the start of the innovation we are bringing to the Microsoft Fabric platform.

Join us at Microsoft Build from May 21^st-23^rd, 2024 either in person in Seattle, Washington, or online. You will hear and see our biggest announcements across the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform and the rest of Microsoft.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric 

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider: 

• Sign up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Visit the Microsoft Fabric website. 
• Join the Fabric community.  
• Read the Microsoft Fabric March 2024 Update blog and other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation. 
• Learn more about Azure Innovate, our new offering to help you adopt AI. 
• Join the Fabric Partner Community on Teams to stay engaged with the Fabric partner and product teams and attend weekly Fabric Engineering Connection calls every Wednesday at 8 am PDT.  
• Check out the Fabric featured partners that have recent experience with deploying customer solutions on Fabric.

The post Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.