Skip to main content
cancel
Turn on suggestions
Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Did you hear? There's a new SQL AI Developer certification (DP-800). Start preparing now and be one of the first to get certified. Register now

kimani
Power BI Team
‎05-19-2025 09:00 AM

Get to insights faster with SaaS databases and "chat with your data"

A recent study from the Social Science Research Network looked at 5,000 developers using generative AI tools in their day-to-day work and found a 26% average increase in completed tasks. The massive opportunity generative AI presents for developers and data professionals was one of the key driving forces behind the initial development of Microsoft Fabric. Rather than simply bolting GenAI onto our existing products, we set out to thoughtfully design a new data platform from the ground up to support generative AI experiences within the product as well as custom AI built on other platforms.

That’s why we launched Fabric with Copilot built in on day one. Across every Fabric experience, you can get help building data solutions and uncovering insights—whether you're creating data flows, generating code, or simply asking questions to better understand data in a Power BI report. Accenture, a global leader in professional services, made Copilot in Fabric accessible to its users. “With Microsoft Fabric, employees can quickly build different dashboards using natural language and Copilot in Power BI. Their day-to-day jobs have been completely transformed,” said Suman Sundar, Data, AI, and Gen AI Lead at Accenture. And they’re not alone. In fact, users who engaged with Copilot in Fabric completed standard data analysis tasks 52% faster and uncovered insights 36% more accurately.1 

We’ve also worked hard to make Fabric the ideal platform to fuel your own custom AI solutions. Whether you're training an AI agent on analytical, operational, or transactional data, all the tools you need are all in Fabric. And today, we’re thrilled to announce an array of new capabilities to help you take better advantage of your data and reason over it with AI agents.

Accelerate app development: Cosmos DB (NoSQL) in Fabric now in preview

Six months ago, we announced Fabric Databases, a new class of SaaS databases built directly into Fabric that are easy to deploy and manage and instantly available to help developers streamline application development. We started with SQL databases in Fabric, which you can provision in seconds for your structured data and is highly available and secure by default.

However, as agents take on increasingly complex tasks, the ability to bring together semi-structured data like text, documents, emails, and graphs will prove critical for AI training. That is why we are thrilled to announce we are expanding Fabric Databases to handle semi-structured data with the preview of Cosmos DB in Fabric. According to a recent Bloomberg CIO study, Azure Cosmos DB was the top choice for building GenAI applications.

We are taking this industry-leading database technology and bringing it to Fabric. With Cosmos DB in Fabric, developers can deploy a high-performance database with just a few clicks while still experiencing enterprise-grade dynamic scalability and 99.999% reliability. With support for both SQL and NoSQL models, developers now have the flexibility to build AI applications grounded in operational, transactional, and analytical data. Best of all, Cosmos DB data is instantly available in OneLake for analytics like near real-time sentiment analysis for chat applications. Check out these new capabilities in action: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whP2vDatcH8

Bring the real world to life: digital twin builder now is in preview

We’re excited to announce the preview of digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric. Digital twin builder is a powerful new capability that enables organizations to create, manage, and visualize digital twins at scale. Built in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, digital twin builder provides a simpler, faster no-code/low-code way to build and manage virtual representations of real-world objects and processes.

Democratize and scale digital twins by making them more accessible and actionable for operators and decision makers. And with seamless integration across Microsoft Fabric—including OneLake and Power BI—organizations can unlock insights across their entire data estate.  Check out the following video of digital twin builder in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy-_g7OrVpo

  • If you want to learn more, you can read more about digital twin builder in Fabric here and you can also start your 60-day Microsoft Fabric free trial here.
  • Read the rest of the Fabric Real-Time Intelligence announcements here.

Empower everyone to interact with their data in Power BI and Copilot Studio

The ability to converse with your data allows teams to explore and reason over complex datasets simply by asking questions. This removes the barriers between users and insights, enabling everyone—from business analysts to data scientists—to make faster, more confident decisions directly within the tools they already use. We’re excited to introduce two new experiences that allow Power BI and Copilot Studio users to interact with their data, expanding how users explore, analyze, and act on data.

Chat with your data experience in Power BI

In the upcoming weeks, business users will be able to engage in natural language conversations with their data across multiple reports and semantic models—without having to navigate to specific reports. This full-screen Copilot experience will be easily accessible from your left pane in Fabric and will be able to help you find relevant reports, analyze data, and answer questions from any data you have access to. Previously, Copilot was limited to the right pane of a single report, allowing questions only about that open report. This chat with your data experience will allow users to ask broader questions and intelligently retrieve the most relevant data—no matter where it resides. With just a few clicks, users can also discover and leverage Fabric data agents, which tap into domain expertise to explore, analyze, and refine findings. Check out the demo to learn more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvH4X9XoNAo

Enrich custom agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio with insights from Fabric data agents

We recently introduced data agents in Microsoft Fabric: AI-powered assistants that go beyond simple data retrieval from OneLake—they engage in natural language conversations about it. These agents can understand the structure, meaning, and context of data to surface insights that are timely, relevant, and actionable. Coming soon in public preview, Fabric data agents can be added to any custom agent built in Microsoft Copilot Studio. These agents can be deployed across channels like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Once connected, the custom agent uses the Fabric data agent to retrieve insights from OneLake, respecting data access permissions. Developers can also define actions (e.g., send an email or trigger workflows) to automate processes, making it easier for users to interact with data and streamline tasks without leaving the chat experience. Check out the demo to learn more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCtk2HPxZi8

Create AI-ready data faster in OneLake with shortcut transformations and materialized lake views

For teams tasked with building new AI and analytics solutions, finding and accessing the necessary data across a sea of disconnected data services can be challenging at the best of times. That’s why we developed OneLake. OneLake is designed as the single point of access to discover and explore data for everyone in your entire organization. You can unify your entire multi-cloud data estate using zero ETL shortcuts and mirroring in OneLake without data duplication or movement.

We are expanding its capabilities with two new previews coming soon that simplify data preparation and transformation at scale: shortcut transformations and materialized lake views.

  • Shortcut transformations let you automatically transform data as you bring it into OneLake or move it between OneLake data items. Shortcut transformations virtualize your data in OneLake while converting your data format to Delta Lake format or applying AI-powered transformations such as summarization, translation, and document classification—all powered by Azure AI Foundry. With just a few clicks, you can virtualize your data in OneLake and make it ready for analytics or AI.
  • Materialized lake views allow you to streamline Medallion architecture implementation in Spark SQL. They allow users to create, schedule, and automate materialized views that orchestrate queries across source tables or other views, ensuring up-to-date results with minimal manual effort. You can set up complex data pipelines with just a few SQL statements, and Fabric’s materialized lake views will handle the rest automatically.

When used together, these capabilities can dramatically accelerate both how you bring your AI-ready data into OneLake and how you progress your data through the layers in the medallion architecture, making it easier than ever for customers to turn raw data into real-world intelligence.

More Fabric innovations for customers

Microsoft Fabric is transforming businesses worldwide, with over 21,000 customers—including more than 70% of the Fortune 500—leveraging the platform today. From Bridgestone and the International Workplace Group to Iceland Foods and Lumen, Fabric is delivering meaningful impact across industries and geographies. See how global leaders are using Microsoft Fabric to power innovation and unlock new possibilities.

Get_to_insights_faster_with_SaaS_databases_and_chat_with_your_dataGet_to_insights_faster_with_SaaS_databases_and_chat_with_your_data

As we continue to evolve the platform, we’re introducing a new wave of enhancements across Microsoft Fabric and its workloads. These updates reinforce our commitment to Fabric’s four core pillars:

  • A complete, AI-powered data platform.
  • An open, AI-ready data lake.
  • Empowering AI-enabled business users.
  • A mission-critical foundation.

Fabric is a complete AI-powered data platform

Fabric is a unified, AI-powered data platform that fosters seamless collaboration across your organization. Today, we’re announcing new enhancements and capabilities that further strengthen the Fabric platform and workloads that will unlock even more possibilities for your data initiatives.

  • The general availability of the Native Execution Engine enables Spark queries to run natively on your lakehouse—up to 6x faster with no code changes or vendor lock-in. This release brings built-in optimizations and resource profiles for faster, more cost-effective data engineering at scale.
  • The preview of real-time endpoints for ML models provides predictive insights to users. Data scientists can now serve real-time predictions securely from any registered ML Model via scalable online endpoints. These endpoints can be called from other Fabric engines or external apps for wide and reliable consumption.
  • The preview of Warehouse Snapshots enables users to access a consistent view of data from a specific point in time, even during ETL processes, supporting better insights and confident decision-making.
  • The general availability of Open Mirroring gives users a fully supported, production-ready path to bring your data into Microsoft Fabric with zero lock-in.
  • The preview of Mirroring for SQL Server (on-premises & 2025) will allow users to replicate data into Fabric OneLake in near real-time, helping organizations seamlessly unify on-prem and cloud data estates for next-gen analytics and AI.
  • The general availability of Copy job capability in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory will be available on July 1. This release will also introduce a new, dedicated billing meter for Copy Jobs, designed to provide more transparency and flexibility in how data movement is priced. Stay tuned for more details coming soon.
  • The general availability of CI/CD support for Dataflow Gen2 introduces Git integration and ALM deployment pipelines, making it easier to manage changes, collaborate efficiently, and move seamlessly across development, testing, and production environments.
  • The general availability of Command Line Interface in Fabric introduces a new terminal for users and admins to run commands via prompts or scripts, enabling a seamless, code-first experience without clicks.

Fabric is open with an AI-ready data lake

In addition to shortcut transformations, we are also making enhancements to OneLake, including:

Enhancements to empowering AI-enabled business users:

  • The preview of Translytical task flows marks a major evolution in Power BI reports, enabling users to automate action directly within the report, streamlining decision-making and operational follow-through. This new capability in Fabric allows users to automate tasks such as updating records, dynamic notifications, adding annotations, and even triggering workflows across systems.
  • The preview of AI prep features in Power BI enhances how Copilot understands and processes your data, leading to more accurate, consistent, and verified answers. These new capabilities allow users to add specific business context, define verified answers, and curate the data that Copilot has access to.
  • Copilot and AI capabilities are now enabled for all paid SKUs in Fabric, making these tools accessible to everyone. Customers on F2 and above can now use Copilot, Fabric data agents, and AI Functions to streamline workflows, generate insights, and drive impactful decisions.

Enhancements to Fabric’s mission critical foundation:

Watch these announcements in action at Microsoft Build

Join us at Microsoft Build from May 19 to 22, 2025 to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions:

  • BRK 204: What's New in Microsoft Databases: Empowering AI-Driven App Dev
  • BRK205: What’s Coming in Fabric Automation and CI/CD
  • BRK206: Microsoft Fabric for Developers: Build Scalable Data & AI Solutions
  • BRK208: Turn data into insights with Copilot and AI agents in Fabric
  • BRK209: Building Real Solutions with Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric
  • BRK213: Enable Advanced AI Scenarios with Unified Data Estates in Microsoft Fabric

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. If you’re considering purchasing Fabric and need help deciding on a SKU and capacity needs, try the Microsoft Fabric SKU estimator.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

To learn more about Fabric: 

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners:

References

1  Based 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.

0