In a world defined by constant change, organizations are not just looking for insights. They need timely, actionable intelligence. Organizations across industries are unlocking competitive advantage with high-granularity and real-time data, driving faster decisions, optimizing workflows, and seizing opportunities.
Since the general availability of Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence in November 2024, the response and momentum have been extraordinary. Thousands of organizations—including leading names in airlines, manufacturing, energy, retail, healthcare, logistics, airports, services, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, sports, and automotive—are already leveraging it to sharpen their competitive and operational edge.
Just a month ago at FabCon Vegas 2025, we introduced dozens of updates in Real-Time Intelligence, focused on developer readiness, security, and enhanced capabilities. See the full list of announcements.
But as companies aim to bring AI and analytics closer to their operations, both physical and digital, they encounter a critical challenge: how to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. This is where digital twins become indispensab9le.
Why digital twins matter
Digital twins create data-driven, real-time representations of entities—whether they are physical assets like machinery, logical entities like customers, or dynamic processes like manufacturing and logistics. As part of an enterprise-wide ontology of entities and processes, they provide unprecedented visibility, context, and control. Yet, building and managing digital twins at scale has traditionally been complex, involving fragmented data sources, inconsistent data quality, and challenges in governance and security.
Digital twins are more than just a virtual representation. They are a dynamic, data-driven bridge between the digital and physical realms. They allow organizations to:
- Predict and prevent problems: anticipate needs and issues before they occur, minimizing downtime and disruptions. Manufacturers can prevent waste while improving product quality and optimizing equipment maintenance schedules.
- Optimize operations: continuously monitor and fine-tune processes to drive efficiency and reduce costs. Retailers can manage in-store energy consumption dynamically while monitoring their back-office operations in real-time.
- Enhance decision-making: use real-time insights to make faster, data-backed decisions. Logistics providers can adjust delivery routes based on cargo, weather and fleet patterns, while energy companies can balance grid loads in response to demand fluctuations.
These are just a few highlights of how digital twins drive customer value across industries. The potential applications are as diverse as the industries they serve.
Introducing digital twin builder in Real-Time Intelligence
Today, we are excited to announce digital twin builder, now available in Preview as a new addition to Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric.
Digital twin builder empowers organizations to create and manage digital replicas of assets, processes, customers, and environments—capturing batch and real-time data to enable continuous monitoring, analysis, and optimization.
With the new digital twin builder, you gain:
- Modeling: Build shared vocabulary and structure to create comprehensive digital replicas of real-world entities, processes, and environments.
- Mapping: Harmonize diverse data sources into an ontology layer that connects digital twins with their real-world counterparts, ensuring accurate representation.
- Relationships: Enrich digital twins with semantic relationships and dependencies, reflecting real-world context.
- Extensions: Enables advanced analytics, visualization, and AI/ML use cases for deep insights and predictive capabilities.
What else is new in Real-Time Intelligence
In addition to the new digital twin builder, we are also excited to announce other new features and enhancements to Real-Time Intelligence designed to provide even greater flexibility, security, and performance for real-time data solutions:
- Teams Groups and Channels for Activator Alerts: Streamline alert management by sending Activator alerts directly to Teams groups and channels, eliminating the need to specify individual recipients.
- Parameterized Fabric Actions in Activator: Automate workflows by triggering Fabric jobs (notebooks or pipelines) directly from Activator rules, passing property values as parameters for precise control.
- Eventhouse Accelerated OneLake Table Shortcuts: Experience top query performance on large datasets, leveraging smart caching and indexing over any OneLake table in Lakehouses, Warehouses, mirrored databases, S3 buckets and many others.
- Managed Private Endpoint for Eventstream: Secure your connections with enhanced data protection through isolated network paths, ensuring secure data flow.
- Service Principal Support for Activator APIs: Securely authenticate and authorize applications accessing Activator resources through Public REST APIs using Service Principals.
- Continuous Ingestion from Azure Storage to Eventhouse (Preview): Automatically ingest data payloads landing in Azure Storage into Eventhouse to provide near real time visibility and analytics over high velocity high volume incoming data.
- Direct Ingestion from Derived Streams (Preview): Streamline data transformation by directly ingesting derived streams into Eventhouse, maintaining data consistency with minimal latency.
Transforming your organization with Real-Time Intelligence
Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence is more than just a data platform. It is a foundation for transforming your organization and its operations. By seamlessly integrating real-time data, analytics, and AI, it empowers your organization to:
- Detect and respond to emerging trends instantly.
- Automate complex workflows and decisions.
- Gain predictive insights with minimal latency.
- Scale operations with consistent, high-quality data.
Whether you are optimizing manufacturing lines, managing smart buildings, improving customer experiences, or enhancing logistics, Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric enables you to turn data into action—fast.
Stay ahead with Real-Time Intelligence
This is just the beginning. Join the thousands of organizations already transforming their operations with Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric.
Want to dive deeper? Sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Fabric and start exploring the full potential of Real-Time Intelligence today.
Interested in the new digital twin builder? Learn more about the capabilities in this deep dive blog post.
Think you know KQL? Test your skills in the new season of Call of the Cyber Duty: Kusto Detective Agency. Compete in challenges, sharpen your expertise, and win rewards.
Stay informed—read the latest blog from Arun Ulag for insights on Real-Time Intelligence and the rest of the Fabric announcements at Build 2025.
Your feedback matters. Join the conversation, explore the features, vote for your favorites, and help shape the future of Real-Time Intelligence.