FabCon 2025: Fueling tomorrow’s AI with new agentic capabilities and security innovations in Fabric 

The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference returns to Las Vegas this week—bigger and better than ever. Thank you to our attendees, speakers, customers, and dedicated teams for making FabCon 2025 an event to remember.

Microsoft Fabric is a unified data platform that continues to transform businesses worldwide, with more than 19,000 organizations and 74% of Fortune 500 companies leveraging Fabric. At FabCon, customers from around the world will share how they are pushing the boundaries of data at scale and unlocking new possibilities for business innovation. 

The London Stock Exchange (LSEG), for example, is leveraging Fabric to unify their data estates and efficiently process their data:

“Microsoft Fabric has been pivotal in LSEG’s data platform modernization journey. With Fabric Spark as the core engine powering our customer facing enterprise data platform, LSEG manages large volumes of time critical financial markets data that require complex data quality and transformation rules, executed at scale and with consistent service levels. Combining this with the broader Fabric eco-system has opened up new and exciting customer experiences and AI-powered opportunities.” 

 —Phil Withey, Head of Architecture, LSEG Microsoft Partners

Similarly, International Workplace Group (IWG) is revolutionizing its approach to data integration: 

“Microsoft Fabric was a game changer because of its ability to create shortcuts without physically moving data from one place to another. Before, if I had to incorporate three sources, I had to create pipelines to bring in the data. That pipeline had a cost. The data movement had a cost. With Fabric, it’s two clicks and that’s it.” 

—José Viegas, Senior Data Architect, IWG 

We’re always listening and learning to further enable customer successes like these by delivering the latest innovations across the data estate. See how customers around the world are using Fabric to transform their teams and industries.

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric 

Today, we’re enhancing the Fabric experience by unlocking new possibilities through key innovations designed to help strengthen security and harness the power of AI to streamline data workstreams like never before:

Introducing OneLake security—an industry breakthrough in data protection 

Managing granular data security across multiple applications and engines is complex, often resulting in excessive restrictions or accidental data exposures. That’s why we’re introducing OneLake security—an industry breakthrough in data protection. OneLake is Fabric’s unified data lake, which seamlessly connects your entire multi-cloud and on-premises data estate. All your teams get a single place to discover, explore, and manage their data—even within apps like Microsoft Teams and Excel. 

Now with OneLake security, you can define access permissions once, and Fabric will enforce it consistently across all engines. Data owners can create security roles, refine permissions, and control access at the row and column levels to securely share data. For example, you can grant access to only certain folders, tables, or even rows in a lakehouse—restricting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) while keeping other data available. This security propagates automatically, so whether you query the data in SQL or visualize it in a Power BI report, you can only see what has been authorized. Check out the following demo to see OneLake security in action:

We are thrilled to share that OneLake security will be available in preview within a few months. In the meantime, if you are interested in trying OneLake security on your workspaces and providing feedback, please visit this early access sign-up page.

• Read more in the OneLake security blog. 

Empowering agentic AI by integrating Fabric data agents with Azure AI Foundry

Data plays a critical role in agentic AI, enabling AI agents to operate independently, make informed decisions, and take meaningful actions. That’s why we are expanding capabilities and deepening integrations between our data and AI platforms. 

Data agents (formerly known as AI skills) in Microsoft Fabric are AI-powered assistants that can learn, adapt, and deliver insights instantly, helping teams make better data-driven decisions. Fabric data agents not only retrieve data from OneLake, but they can reason over and understand the data—what it means, how it’s structured, and when it’s relevant. 

Starting today, organizations can use Azure AI Foundry to connect customized, conversational agents, created in Fabric. AI developers can now use Azure AI Agent Service to securely ground AI agent outputs with enterprise knowledge in Fabric data agents, so that responses are accurate, relevant, and contextually aware. By combining Fabric’s sophisticated data analysis over enterprise data with Azure AI Foundry’s cutting-edge GenAI technology, businesses can create custom conversational AI agents leveraging domain expertise. 

“Fabric data agents are a powerful and value-adding tool in data environments. Acting as a conversational capability layer, we can use data agents to ‘talk’ to our data, understand it, and derive different insights in support of our daily decision making.”

—Maureen Tan, Head of AI Center of Expertise, NTT DATA

• Learn how NTT DATA is simplifying their AI deployment.
• Read more about Fabric data agent integration in the Fabric blog and Azure AI blog.
• Check out the following demo to learn more:

Copilot and AI capabilities in Fabric will be available for all SKUs

We are excited to announce that Copilot and AI capabilities will be enabled for all paid SKUs in Fabric, making these tools accessible to everyone within the coming weeks. This expansion is driven by your feedback about the impact Copilot in Microsoft Fabric has had on your productivity, and how broadening access to Copilot would benefit more teams. With this latest update, customers on F2 and above can use Copilot and AI capabilities, such as Fabric data agents, to streamline workflows, generate insights, and drive impactful decisions.

• Read more about these changes in the Copilot for Fabric SKU update blog. 

Seamlessly migrate your data to Fabric 

We are excited to announce the preview of a migration experience natively built into the Fabric UI, enabling Azure Synapse Analytics (data warehouse) customers to transition seamlessly to Microsoft Fabric. With a built-in, intelligent assessment, guided support, and AI-powered assistance, this experience simplifies migration of code and data while helping customers unlock Fabric’s unified data foundation, AI-driven analytics, and enhanced performance—without the complexity of traditional migrations. 

• Read more in the Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse blog. 

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Additional Fabric innovations

In addition to the above, we are introducing a series of updates across the Microsoft Fabric platform and its workloads. These advancements will further progress our commitments to our four core Fabric pillars: 

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 sharing new enhancements and capabilities that will further strengthen the Fabric platform and workloads, which will unlock even more possibilities for your data initiatives. 

Platform enhancements: 

• The preview of Command Line Interface (CLI) in Fabric introduces a new terminal that allows users and admins to execute commands across Fabric using interactive prompts or scripts, enabling a seamless, code-first experience without relying on clicks. 

• The preview of new CI/CD enhancements expands support across the Fabric platform, including variable libraries for workspaces, Service Principal support for GitHub, and Deployment Pipelines Fabric APIs Phase II. 

• The preview of User Data Functions introduces a way for developers to implement and reuse custom business logic in Fabric data science and data engineering workflows, streamlining development and improving efficiency. 

• The general availability of the Terraform provider for Fabric, to help customers ensure deployments and management tasks are executed accurately and consistently. 

• The general availability of Tags, which allows users to optimally describe items they own, and help enhance organization and discoverability of data in Fabric. 

Data integration enhancements: 

• Several enhancements to Dataflow Gen2 including the general availability of Incremental Refresh, and the preview to save a Dataflow Gen1 as a Dataflow Gen2. 

• Database Mirroring has been enhanced with key new enterprise capabilities, including a new source (Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server) and support for connecting to data sources over the On-premises and Virtual Network Data Gateways. 

• The general availability of Apache Airflow job empowers customers to run their Apache Airflow DAGs in Microsoft Fabric, with a serverless Apache Airflow runtime. 

• The general availability of the Copy job introduces a new simplified experience for customers who need to move data between different data sources and destinations. It also introduces support for batch and incremental data movement. 

• The preview of key orchestration enhancements is now available, enabling the creation of metadata-driven pipelines that orchestrate Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) parameterized invocation from Data Pipelines 

• Read more about all the Data Factory enhancements in the What’s new with Fabric Data Factory.

Real-time intelligence enhancements:

• The general availability of Azure and Fabric Events transforms Fabric into an event-driven platform. Users can leverage the Real-Time hub to discover and subscribe to Azure and Fabric Events across OneLake, Fabric jobs, Workspaces, and Azure Blob Storage.

• The preview of new eventstream connectors which allows users to bring in data from additional non-Microsoft sources, including Weather, Solace PubSub+, ADX Table Streamify, MQTT v5, Event Grid Namespaces, and Confluent with Schema Registry. 

• Read more about our Real Time Intelligence enhancements in the Real Time Updates blog.

Data Engineering and Data Science enhancements: 

• The preview of Autoscale Billing for Spark helps optimize Spark job costs by offloading Data Engineering workloads to a serverless billing mode. Capacity admins can set a max capacity units (CUs) limit in capacity settings, ensuring Spark jobs use dedicated CUs instead of shared Fabric Capacity. 

• A new Copilot experience in Fabric notebooks that improves productivity with in-cell interactions, better code generation, and seamless Fabric integration. 

• The preview of AI functions provides powerful capabilities to apply LLM-powered transformations, such as summarization, classification, and text generation to your OneLake data—all with a single line of code.

Partner/ISV integrations 

• At Ignite, we announced the general availability of the Workload Development Toolkit (WDK) and introduced ISV workloads that bring new capabilities and value to our joint customers. We are excited to now announce the general availability of Fabric workloads from Osmos, Profisee, and PowerBI.tips, along with public previews of new workloads from Celonis, CluedIn, Neo4j, Lumel, Statsig, and Striim in the Fabric Workload Hub. In addition, CluedIn also announced a public preview of its integration with Open Mirroring in Fabric.

Fabric is open with an AI-ready data lake 

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

• A modern get-data experience with OneLake catalog integration in Microsoft Excel (in Office Insiders Fast) enables users to explore the OneLake catalog directly from Excel, expanding accessibility beyond the existing Microsoft Teams integration. 

• Coming soon, we are releasing the general availability of on-premises data gateways support for Amazon S3, S3-compatible sources, and Google Cloud Platform allows users to create shortcuts to on-premises data sources hosted behind a firewall or within a Virtual Private Cloud. 

• The enhancements for cross-tenant sharing, including the ability to share multiple tables at once, Lakehouse schemas, as well as tables from Fabric SQL databases, KQL databases, and OneLake shortcuts (coming soon). This shared data can now be accessed via SQL analytics endpoints and semantic models. 

• An updated version of the Fabric Link to Dataverse preview enables even faster and more secure data virtualization from Dataverse, the data platform for the Power Platform and Dynamics 365, thanks to back-end improvements. We are also announcing a new Mirrored Dataverse option in Fabric. Learn more about both announcements. 

• Multi-tenant organization (MTO) support is now generally available.

• CI/CD support for OneLake shortcuts is now in preview.

Fabric empowers every business user with AI capabilities

Fabric empowers business users to quickly uncover key insights in a Power BI report by simply asking Copilot. With AI-enhanced Q&A and intuitive visuals seamlessly embedded in Microsoft 365 apps, everyone can better understand and act on their data with ease. To further empower this mission, we’re announcing that: 

• The preview of Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI desktop, which allows users to build Power BI semantic models for lightning-fast reports that query data directly from OneLake without scheduling refreshes and without data duplication. This feature will also enable users to add in tables from multiple Fabric artifacts in the same Direct Lake semantic model for ultimate reusability of OneLake data.

• The preview of Datapoint annotations in Power BI add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint, which allows users to add descriptive text to a specific data point within a visualization.

Fabric provides a mission-critical foundation 

Our final promise is that you can confidently deploy and manage Microsoft Fabric with category-leading performance, instant scalability, shared resilience, and built-in security, governance, and compliance. To further that mission, we’re excited to introduce several enhancements to our mission-critical promise, including: 

Mission-critical foundation enhancement with Microsoft Purview:

• Coming soon, the preview of Microsoft Purview for Copilot in Power BI. The integration will enable discovery of data risks such as sensitive data in user prompts and responses, protect sensitive data with Insider Risk Management to identify and investigate risky AI usage, and govern AI usage with audit, eDiscovery, retention policies, and non-compliant usage detection.  

• Coming soon, we are expanding Purview Data Loss Prevention policies Fabric coverage beyond lakehouses and semantic models, to now also include Fabric KQL databases and mirrored databases. This will allow security admins to detect sensitive data uploads, such as SSNs, and trigger automated actions in more sources. 

• The preview of Data Observability within the Unified Catalog to investigate the relationship between data products and any assets (including Fabric assets) associated with them to identify the root cause of quality issues. 

• Read more in the secure and govern your data with Microsoft Purview blog.

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 choosing a SKU, we’re excited to share that a new Fabric SKU Estimator will soon be available in public preview. Stay tuned. 

Watch the action at the Fabric Conference

To see these announcements in action, register and secure your spot today through Wednesday April 2, 2025. With over 200 expert-led sessions, you can join thousands of attendees who are diving deep into Microsoft Fabric, exploring innovations in AI, databases, analytics, business intelligence, and more.  

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric 

To learn more about Fabric:  

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial.
• 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.
• See how the Microsoft IDEAS team is building on Fabric. 
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation. 
• Check out the newly launched Fabric Tech Talk Fridays (F²T²), which is the go-to show for Fabric MVPs, users, and fans. Join us for live demos, real use cases, and expert insights. Watch the latest episodes here. 

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners: 

• The Future of Microsoft Fabric and Enterprise Innovation by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PWC). 
• How to navigate the complexity of data supply chains by Ernst & Young Global Limited (EY). 
• How Microsoft is making data platforms smarter by Hitachi Solutions. 
• Healthcare Innovation with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Fabric meets Agentic AI by Sonata Software. 
• Unlocking business potential with Microsoft Fabric by Eide Bailly. 
• A comprehensive solution for Healthcare on Microsoft Fabric by Mandelbulb Technologies. 
• Microsoft Fabric raises the bar again by Kanerika Software. 
• Implementing Data Agents in Microsoft Fabric and integrating predictive analytics into Power BI and Migrating from On-Prem SQL to Microsoft Fabric by Baker Tilly US, LLP. 
• Fabric Copilot is now available for all SKUs! by RSM US, LLP. 
• Smart Manufacturing: Unlocking Real-Time Intelligence with Azure IoT Operations and Microsoft Fabric by b.telligent. 

Arun Ulagaratchagan

Corporate Vice President, Azure Data–Microsoft

Arun leads product management, engineering, and cloud operations for Azure Data, which includes databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging, and business intelligence. The products in his teams' portfolio include Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure MySQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric.

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