Copilot Studio, Foundry, Fabric Data Agent or Operations Agent? Which one to pick
Most confusion comes from the word "agent" being used for all four. The fastest way to choose is to ask two questions: who builds it (maker or developer) and what triggers it (a person asking, or data changing). Meet the four Copilot Studio is Microsoft's low-code agent builder on Power Platform. You describe the agent in plain language, add knowledge (SharePoint, Dataverse, websites), plug in 1,000+ connectors and Power Automate flows, then publish to Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot or a website. It is also the easiest place to orchestrate other agents, including Foundry and Fabric agents. Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) is the pro-code platform for engineers. You pick from a large model catalog, write orchestration in code, run evaluations, trace every call and deploy behind private networking. Use it when the agent is a product component, not just a chat window. Fabric data agent is a read-only, conversational analyst over your Fabric data. It turns a question into SQL, DAX or KQL against up to five sources (lakehouse, warehouse, Power BI semantic model, KQL database, ontology) and respects each user's permissions. It is generally available. Fabric operations agent lives in Real-Time Intelligence. You give it an Eventhouse, a business goal and allowed actions. It writes its own monitoring rules, wakes up when a condition hits, reasons over the data, and messages people in Teams or runs a Power Automate action. It reached general availability in mid-2026. Which one should I pick? Ask the questions in order and stop at the first "yes". A "yes" does not rule the others out: a data agent or Foundry agent is often published through Copilot Studio. Side by side Copilot Studio Foundry Fabric data agent Fabric operations agent Core job Converse and automate Build custom AI apps and agents Answer questions over data Monitor live data and act Triggered by A person (or event/flow) Your code A person or another agent A data condition Builder Maker, IT, business AI engineer, developer Data/BI team Ops and RTI team Skill level Low-code Pro-code Low-code + good data modelling Low-code, chat-based setup Data it reaches Connectors, SharePoint, Dataverse, other agents Anything you wire up Lakehouse, warehouse, semantic model, KQL, ontology Eventhouse (KQL) streams Writes or acts? Yes, via flows and tools Yes, whatever you code No, read-only Yes, Teams messages and Power Automate actions Where users meet it Teams, M365 Copilot, web, other channels Your app, API, Teams Fabric, Copilot Studio, Foundry, M365 Copilot, MCP Teams chat or channel Billing Copilot Credits Azure consumption Fabric capacity (CU) Fabric capacity (CU) Pick it when You need speed and M365 reach You need model choice, evals, isolation People Real-world scenarios These are the patterns that come up most often in the community. Each names the tool that fits and why. HR policy helper in Teams → Copilot Studio. A 3,000-person company wants staff to ask "How many leave days do I have?" and "Book Thursday off." Knowledge sits in SharePoint, leave balances in an HR system with a connector. A maker builds it in days and publishes to Teams. No developer needed. Insurance claims triage inside a customer app → Foundry. An insurer reads uploaded photos and PDFs, extracts fields, scores fraud risk and returns a decision to its claims system through an API. It needs a vision model, evaluation datasets, tracing and a private network. That is a product feature, so it belongs in Foundry. Sales leaders asking about pipeline → Fabric data agent. "Which regions missed Q3 target, and by how much?" The data agent sits on the sales semantic model, writes the DAX, and only shows rows each person may see. Publish it into Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Studio so leaders never open Fabric. Cold-chain monitoring for a food distributor → Fabric operations agent. Truck temperature sensors stream into an Eventhouse. The goal: "Keep chilled loads between 2 and 5 °C." When a truck drifts, the agent posts in the fleet Teams channel with the truck, route and trend, and can trigger a Power Automate flow to reroute or open a ticket. Retail "what should I do?" assistant → all four together. Microsoft's Zava reference demo shows this: an operations agent spots a stock risk, a Fabric data agent pulls the numbers, Foundry agents for sales and product reason over them, and Copilot Studio is the front door in Teams where the manager approves a reallocation. Better together The strongest designs use more than one. Copilot Studio meets people where they work, Foundry adds custom reasoning, and the two Fabric agents keep answers and actions grounded in governed data. The operations agent is the only one that starts on its own: it reads live events and reaches people in Teams without anyone asking first. Status as of October 2026, and gotchas Fabric data agent is GA, and its Copilot Studio integration went GA at FabCon Barcelona (October 2026). Data agents in Microsoft Copilot Chat were only a sneak peek there. The data agent inside Copilot in Power BI was retired on 26 August 2026. Use the data agent directly, or through Foundry, Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365 Copilot or its MCP endpoint. Operations agent is GA (June to July 2026). Newer abilities, such as root-cause investigations and pre-approved actions, are still in public preview. Operations agents need a paid Fabric capacity. Trial capacity is not supported, and an admin must turn on the Copilot/AI and operations agent tenant settings. A data agent is only as good as the model under it. Clear table names, descriptions, relationships and agent instructions matter more than prompt tricks. An operations agent automates your mistakes too. Start with "recommend" actions that a person approves, then move to automatic actions. Don't pick Foundry just for governance. Both Copilot Studio and Foundry agents now show up in the same Microsoft governance and security tooling. Pick on build style, model needs and network needs. Rule of thumb: prototype in Copilot Studio for a week. If you hit a wall (model choice, evals, isolation, scale), that wall is your Foundry requirement. Sources Operations agent (Generally Available), Fabric Updates Blog Improving operational efficiency with operations agents, Fabric Updates Blog Build, deploy, and govern Fabric at scale (FabCon 2026), Fabric Community FabCon Barcelona 2026 announcements, James Serra Retirement of data agent in Copilot in Power BI, Fabric Community What are Fabric data agents: GA status and limits, Atlan Fabric data agent vs operations agent, Daymark One agent, many channels: querying Fabric data agents, Data Science at Microsoft Copilot Studio vs Microsoft Foundry, Nasstar Zava Real-Time Intelligence demo, Microsoft CDXFabric Data Agents Get Smarter on 2 November. Can You Prove Yours Still Answers Correctly?
Microsoft announced Advanced NL2SQL and advanced DAX generation as generally available on 19 October 2026. The core improvements roll out to the standard runtime by default, together with a move to GPT-5.6 Terra. Separately, the old custom-tool way of calling a Fabric data agent from Microsoft Foundry stops being supported on 6 November. Date (2026) What happens What you should have done 19 Oct GA announced Read this post Now to 1 Nov Changes available on the preview runtime Build a ground-truth set, baseline standard, test preview 2 Nov Standard-runtime rollout begins, no opt-in Baseline frozen and stored 6 Nov Foundry custom-connection integration unsupported Foundry agents moved to Fabric IQ By 10 Nov Rollout expected to complete Re-run, diff the queries, tell affected users What Microsoft actually announced The query generators stop writing in one pass and start investigating first. That is why behaviour can change even where accuracy improves. Until now, NL2SQL and NL2DAX generated a query in a single pass, resolving schema, business definitions and filter values at once. As the GA announcement puts it, a wrong guess still runs, and the wrong answer looks like a right one. Advanced NL2SQL explores the schema, tests joins and looks up real filter values before writing SQL. It works in three modes: Example query following: adapts a relevant example query, for instance by swapping a filter value. Clarifying questions: asks the user when it can't answer reliably. Data exploration: infers logic from your examples and checks assumptions against the data. Advanced DAX generation brings the same idea to semantic models: an agentic tool-calling loop plus instance value indexing, so a user's "California" maps to the stored "CA". Microsoft's internal benchmarks Microsoft's 2026 internal evaluations, standard versus preview runtime. Microsoft notes results vary by workload, model and configuration. Benchmark Smart-answer accuracy P50 latency P95 latency NL2SQL, standard 78.8% 28.4 s 46.8 s Advanced NL2SQL, preview 90.9% 26.0 s 32.9 s NL2DAX, standard 89.15% 39.1 s 97.5 s Advanced DAX, preview 91.86% 20.4 s 34.7 s SQL gains 12.1 accuracy points. DAX gains only 2.7 points, but its tail latency drops by about 64%. If your semantic-model agents felt slow, that is your headline. What moves, and what doesn't Moving to standard: Advanced NL2SQL, advanced DAX generation and the GPT-5.6 Terra model upgrade. Staying in preview: schema descriptions and topics for SQL sources. Two details catch people out (runtime docs): A published agent keeps the runtime it was published with. Publish on preview and it stays on preview until you republish. Check every production agent. Runtime choice doesn't pick the model. A preview run today is a strong signal, not a guaranteed copy of standard after 10 November. Re-run after the rollout regardless. Why "better on average" can still surprise you A benchmark counts right answers. Your users notice changed answers. The second one generates support tickets. Workaround instructions start fighting the agent. Rules written to patch single-pass behaviour may no longer be needed, and unneeded guidance can steer an agent away from a path it would have found itself. Example queries get followed more literally. Good when they are current. An example with last year's fiscal logic now gets reproduced more faithfully. Ambiguous questions get a question back. Better for users, but it breaks anything downstream that expects a number, such as a Copilot Studio flow or a Foundry agent chain. A correct new answer can be a business problem. "Active customers in Q3" returned 41,200 because of a wrong date column; now it correctly returns 38,900. Someone may already have put 41,200 in a board pack. The pass count hides the churn. 40 of 50 pass before, 44 after. Looks like +4. Underneath, 6 newly pass and 2 now fail: 8 changed answers, 2 regressions. Question status Count Action Pass both, same query 34 Nothing Pass both, different query 4 Right for the right reason? Failed before, passes now 6 Tell anyone who acted on the old answer Passed before, fails now 2 Fix instructions or examples first Fail both 4 Existing backlog Illustrative numbers. The structure is what your own run should produce. The pre-rollout routine: six steps for this week You need a Fabric notebook, a lakehouse and the Fabric data agent SDK. The SDK and its evaluation features are in preview, so note the version you used. You also need F2 or higher capacity, the data agent tenant settings enabled and read access to the sources. Step 1: Inventory agents and dependencies For each published agent, record the runtime it was published on, its source types, where it is consumed (Fabric, Teams, M365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Foundry) and its business owner. Anything called from Foundry via the old custom tool also goes on your 6 November list. Step 2: Build a ground-truth set that covers the risky cases The SDK takes a DataFrame or CSV with question and expected_answer. Aim for 30 to 60 questions per agent, ideally from real usage, covering filter values ("California" stored as "CA"), example-adjacent questions, multi-join questions, ambiguous questions and high-stakes KPI figures. %pip install -U fabric-data-agent-sdk import pandas as pd gt = pd.DataFrame(columns=["question", "expected_answer"], data=[ ["Total net sales in California for September 2026", "1,284,550.20"], ["Returns rate by region for FY26", "North 3.1%, South 2.7%, East 4.0%, West 3.4%"], ["What was revenue last year?", "CLARIFY: should ask gross or net, fiscal or calendar"], ["Active customers in Q3 2026", "38,900"], ]) gt.to_csv("/lakehouse/default/Files/agent_eval/ground_truth_sales.csv", index=False) The values are placeholders. Use answers your business owner has signed off. Step 3: Use a critic prompt that accepts clarifying questions The default grader would mark a good clarifying question as wrong. The SDK accepts a custom critic_prompt with {query}, {expected_answer} and {actual_answer} placeholders. critic_prompt = """ Query: {query} Expected Answer: {expected_answer} Actual Answer: {actual_answer} If the expected answer starts with CLARIFY:, respond 'yes' only if the actual answer asks a clarifying question about the same ambiguity. Otherwise respond 'yes' only if the actual answer is numerically and semantically equivalent. Is the actual answer equivalent to the expected answer? """ Step 4: Capture the standard baseline before 2 November Run against the production stage, which is what users hit today. Give each run its own table. from fabric.dataagent.evaluation import ( evaluate_data_agent, get_evaluation_summary, get_evaluation_details) agent_name = "SalesAgent" baseline_table = "eval_sales_standard_baseline_2026_10" baseline_id = evaluate_data_agent( gt, agent_name, table_name=baseline_table, data_agent_stage="production", critic_prompt=critic_prompt) print(get_evaluation_summary(baseline_table)) baseline = get_evaluation_details(baseline_id, baseline_table, get_all_rows=True) print(baseline.columns.tolist()) # check column names in your SDK version This writes <table_name> with per-question results and <table_name>_steps with the detailed reasoning and step-by-step execution. Look there for the generated SQL or DAX, and keep both tables as evidence. For a single question, the Diagnostics button exports the full steps too. Step 5: Record P50 and P95 latency through the MCP endpoint The evaluation tables focus on correctness, so time each question against the published agent's MCP endpoint. This adapts Microsoft's SDK sample: import time, numpy as np from azure.identity import InteractiveBrowserCredential from mcp import ClientSession from mcp.client.streamable_http import streamablehttp_client mcp_url = ("https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/mcp/workspaces/<workspace-id>" "/dataagents/<data-agent-id>/agent") cred = InteractiveBrowserCredential() async def ask(q): tok = cred.get_token("https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/.default").token async with streamablehttp_client(mcp_url, headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {tok}"}) as (r, w, _): async with ClientSession(r, w) as s: await s.initialize() tool = (await s.list_tools()).tools[0] arg = next(iter(tool.inputSchema["properties"])) t0 = time.perf_counter() await s.call_tool(tool.name, {arg: q}) return time.perf_counter() - t0 secs = [await ask(q) for q in gt.question for _ in range(3)] print(f"P50 {np.percentile(secs, 50):.1f}s P95 {np.percentile(secs, 95):.1f}s") Run each question several times; single timings are noisy. The MCP response returns answer text only, not the query, which is why query evidence comes from the steps table. Step 6: Preview now, standard after 10 November, then diff Preview, today. Switch your draft to preview and evaluate the sandbox stage, leaving production untouched. The switch comes from the runtime docs (the ribbon's Runtime dropdown works too); check the SDK reference for the FabricDataAgentManagement import. data_agent = FabricDataAgentManagement(agent_name) data_agent.update_configuration(enable_preview_features=True) preview_id = evaluate_data_agent(gt, agent_name, table_name="eval_sales_preview_2026_10", data_agent_stage="sandbox", critic_prompt=critic_prompt) data_agent.update_configuration(enable_preview_features=False) # don't publish on preview by accident Standard, after 10 November. Repeat Steps 4 and 5 against production with new table names. The diff. Compare per question, never just the summary. Fill in your SDK's pass-flag and answer column names. def diff_runs(before, after, passed="<pass-col>", answer="<answer-col>"): m = before.merge(after, on="question", suffixes=("_b", "_a")) def status(r): b, a = r[passed + "_b"], r[passed + "_a"] if b and a: return "same" if str(r[answer + "_b"]) == str(r[answer + "_a"]) else "answer changed" return "newly correct" if a else ("REGRESSION" if b else "fail both") m["status"] = m.apply(status, axis=1) return m.sort_values("status") Then compare the generated queries from both _steps tables. A changed query with the same answer deserves a look: it may be right by coincidence on this month's data. When a result changed, check the run steps for: which example query it picked, which join path it chose, which instruction it followed, and whether a clarifying question was the right call. Most fixes will be in your examples and instructions, not the platform. The 6 November deadline: move Foundry agents to Fabric IQ If a Foundry agent calls your data agent through the original custom tool, that path stops being supported on 6 November 2026 (retirement notice). The catch: the replacement, the Fabric IQ (OneLake Catalog) tool, is in preview. Production agents move from a deprecated integration to a preview one, four days into the query rollout. Make that an explicit risk decision, with a fallback plan. What you gain: pick agents by name from the catalog, connect several data agents to one Foundry agent (the old tool allowed one), and an MCP endpoint per agent. Microsoft also says responses will soon include the query used. Portal migration, in Microsoft's order: Publish the data agent with a rich, detailed description. In the Foundry portal, open the agent and add the Fabric IQ (OneLake Catalog) tool, then select your data agent. Update the Foundry agent's instructions to name each data agent and what it handles. Remove the old custom tool, save, and test with representative questions. For code, use the MCP URL from the agent's Settings > Model Context Protocol tab and the FabricIQPreviewTool in azure-ai-projects>=2.2.0. Full samples are in Connect agents to Microsoft Fabric with Fabric IQ. Test the two changes separately. If you migrate on 5 November and answers shift on 8 November, you won't know why. Migrate now and baseline through Foundry before 2 November. The connection calls Fabric as the signed-in user, so test with accounts that match real users' permissions and row-level security. When the new answer is right, who tells people? The hardest part is not technical. Someone acted on the old number. Decide now who owns that conversation: Each agent has a business owner who reviews "newly correct" and "answer changed" rows. High-stakes answers get a change note: old answer, new answer, why, and since when. The note goes where the old answer was used: report owners, Teams channels, Copilot Studio makers. Regressions get fixed, not avoided. Standard is changing anyway, so plan the fix. Also tell users before 2 November that answers may become more precise and the agent may ask follow-up questions. A warned surprise becomes a feature. Your checklist Inventory agents, runtimes, consumers and owners Build ground-truth sets, including ambiguous and high-stakes questions Write a critic prompt that accepts correct clarifying questions Capture the standard baseline, steps and latency before 2 November Run the set on preview in the sandbox stage Migrate Foundry agents to Fabric IQ and baseline them before 6 November Decide explicitly on running production on the preview Fabric IQ tool Re-run after 10 November and diff per question and per query Retire workaround instructions and refresh stale examples Send change notes for high-stakes answers that movedConnect Fabric Data Agents to Copilot Studio with MCP (+ Assistants API Migration Fix)
Business users want answers where they already work, in Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, and those answers need to come from trusted, governed data. Fabric data agents in Copilot Studio do exactly that, and the integration is now generally available. There is also a deadline you may already have passed. If you connected to Fabric data agents through the OpenAI Assistants API, your integration has likely stopped working. This guide covers both the setup and the fix. What's new Fabric data agents now connect to Copilot Studio through a new tool-based experience: you select Add a tool, search for Fabric, and choose Fabric IQ Data MCP. Your Copilot Studio agent then calls the Fabric data agent like any other tool. Microsoft Community Three points matter for architects: Data stays governed. The Fabric data agent keeps running in Fabric, respects permissions on the underlying data sources, and returns answers grounded in governed enterprise data. Microsoft Community The orchestrator decides. The orchestrator chooses when to use enterprise data and when to use its other knowledge sources and tools. Microsoft Community You can combine agents. You can pair several Fabric data agents with other business systems to build richer solutions. A sales agent could query a sales data agent, a finance data agent and your CRM connector in a single conversation. Microsoft Community Behind this, Copilot Studio also introduced a redesigned authoring surface and runtime powered by the GitHub Copilot harness. Microsoft Community Why MCP matters Model Context Protocol (MCP) is becoming the standard way agents connect to tools and data. By exposing Fabric data agents through MCP, Microsoft makes them a reusable building block instead of a one-off integration. The same move is happening elsewhere: Fabric data agents in Microsoft Foundry are now easier to connect and monitor, and that integration is moving to MCP too. Microsoft Community You build a data agent once in Fabric, and Copilot Studio, Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot can all use it. Prerequisites Before you start, check that you have: A Microsoft Fabric workspace on Fabric capacity Data ready to use: a lakehouse, warehouse, semantic model or similar source with clean, well-named tables Permission to create items in the Fabric workspace Access to Copilot Studio with permission to build and publish agents Microsoft 365 Copilot or Teams, depending on where you want to publish Tip: the quality of your data agent depends on the quality of your data. Clear table and column names and descriptions make a big difference to answer accuracy. Step 1: Build and test your Fabric data agent In your Fabric workspace, create a new data agent item, then: Add data sources. Connect the lakehouse, warehouse or semantic model the agent should answer from. Start narrow, since one domain per agent works best. Write agent instructions. Explain the business context, key terms and rules. For example: "Revenue means net revenue after returns. Fiscal year starts in April. Always exclude internal test accounts." Add example questions and queries. Give sample questions with the correct query logic, so the agent learns your patterns. Test thoroughly. Ask the questions your business users actually ask and compare the answers with your certified reports. Publish the agent once the answers are reliable. Step 2: Add the data agent to Copilot Studio This is the new MCP-based flow. Create or open an agent in Copilot Studio, go to Tools, select Add a tool, search for Fabric, and add Fabric IQ Data MCP. Microsoft Community Then: Select the Fabric data agent you published in Step 1. Give the tool a clear description, such as "Answers questions about sales, revenue and pipeline from governed Fabric data." The orchestrator reads this to decide when to call the tool, so be specific. In your Copilot Studio agent's instructions, tell it when to use the tool, for example: "For any question about sales numbers or targets, use the Sales Data tool." Step 3: Test in Copilot Studio Test your agent in Preview before publishing. Check that: Microsoft Community Data questions trigger the Fabric tool, and general questions don't Answers match the results from Fabric directly A user without access to certain data gets no answer from it, since the data agent respects permissions on the underlying sources Follow-up questions ("and what about last quarter?") work as expected Step 4: Publish to Teams or Microsoft 365 Copilot When you're happy with the results, publish to Microsoft Teams or Microsoft 365 Copilot. Business users can now ask data questions in the tools they use every day, without opening a report. Microsoft Community Roll out to a small pilot group first, collect feedback, and improve the data agent's instructions before rolling out widely. The Assistants API retirement: what broke and how to fix it This part matters if you built programmatic integrations. What happened: The OpenAI Assistants API, which powered the orchestration layer of the Fabric data agent, was scheduled to be shut down by OpenAI on August 26, 2026. After that date, direct calls to the Assistants API stop working. Microsoft Community Who is affected: anyone who connects to a Fabric data agent programmatically through the Assistants API needs to migrate to the data agent MCP endpoint. Typical examples are custom apps, scripts, or third-party tools calling the data agent directly. Microsoft Community Who is mostly fine: SDK and Fabric portal users need little or no action, because Microsoft migrates those experiences internally, although conversation history may reset once. Microsoft Community What stays the same: existing agent data sources, instructions and tools remain unchanged. You don't need to rebuild your agents, only change how you connect to them. Microsoft Community Migration checklist Find your integrations. Search your code and configs for Assistants API calls that target Fabric data agents. Check custom apps, automation scripts, Azure Functions and any third-party tools. Check for failures since late August. Errors or silent failures after August 26 are a strong sign an integration is affected. Move to the MCP endpoint. Update each integration to connect through the data agent's MCP endpoint instead. Follow Microsoft's guide, "Prepare your Fabric Data Agent integrations for Assistants API retirement," for the current details. Consider Copilot Studio instead of custom code. If a custom app only exists to put a chat interface on a data agent, the Copilot Studio route above may replace it with less code to maintain. Tell users about history resets. If you use the portal or SDK, let users know earlier conversations may disappear once. Retest. Run your standard question set again after migrating to confirm the answers haven't changed. Best practices for production One domain per data agent. Separate agents for sales, finance and operations are easier to test, govern and improve than one agent that tries to do everything. Write tool descriptions carefully. In Copilot Studio, the tool description is how the orchestrator decides what to call. Vague descriptions lead to wrong tool choices. Treat instructions like code. Version them, review changes, and retest after every edit. Keep a test question set. Keep 20 to 30 real questions with expected answers, and run them after any change to data, instructions or model. Watch permissions. Answers respect underlying permissions, so a mistake in data security becomes a mistake in agent answers. Review access regularly. Start small and grow. Pilot with one team, measure how often answers are right, then expand. The bottom line Connecting Fabric data agents to Copilot Studio through MCP turns your governed Fabric data into a reusable tool that any agent can use, and it puts trusted answers directly into Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot. The setup takes minutes once your data agent is solid. If you built integrations on the Assistants API, make migration your first job this week. Your agents, data sources and instructions don't need to change, only the connection. After that, you're on the platform Microsoft is building its agent strategy on.Rebranding 40 Reports by Hand? Fabric's New Report JSON Functions Fix That
Ever had to open dozens of published reports one by one just to update a company name, a logo reference, or a text box label? Fabric now has official functions to pull a report's layout as JSON, make the change once, and push it back - without opening Power BI Desktop at all. Here's what that looks like with a real example.
