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Microsoft Build 2025: New Capabilities Advance Microsoft Fabric Optimization
Microsoft rapidly strengthens Microsoft Fabric with new capabilities that accelerate insight discovery using SaaS databases and interactive chat with your data features.
Key Highlights
- New Microsoft Fabric capabilities enable users to gain insights faster with SaaS databases using improved natural language processing.
- Cosmos DB (NoSQL) in Fabric is now available to speed up application development.
- Digital Twin Builder in Microsoft Fabric has been introduced to enable scalable creation and management of digital twins.
- Microsoft Copilot Studio enhances custom agents by integrating insights from Fabric data agents.
- Now shortcut transformations enable data transformation as data is ingested into OneLake.
- Microsoft Fabric is now better positioned to serve as the integrated, AI-driven data platform that promotes more efficient collaboration throughout organizations.
The News
At Microsoft Build 2025, Microsoft unveiled an array of new Microsoft Fabric capabilities aimed at enabling customers to swiftly fulfill their data potential with a unified analytics solution that connects it all. Microsoft Fabric enables the management of data in one place with a suite of analytics experiences that work together, all hosted on a lake-centric SaaS solution for simplicity and to maintain a single source of truth. Find out more by clicking here to read the Microsoft blog.
Analyst Take
Microsoft shrewdly leveraged its annual Microsoft Build event to unveil an array of new capabilities to help you take better advantage of data and reason over it with AI agents. Microsoft has prioritized making Fabric the optimized platform to fuel the development of custom AI solutions. For developers and software engineers training an AI agent on analytical, operational, or transactional data, all the tools they need are all in Fabric.
Microsoft Fabric is already widely adopted by businesses globally, with over 21,000 customers, including more than 70% of Fortune 500 companies, actively using the platform. Organizations such as Bridgestone, International Workplace Group, Iceland Foods, and Lumen are indicating experiencing significant benefits across diverse industries and regions.
Microsoft spotlighted a recent Social Science Research Network study of 5,000 developers using generative AI tools that reported a 26% average increase in task completion. This significant potential of generative AI for developers and data professionals proved a primary motivation for it to develop Microsoft Fabric. Instead of merely integrating GenAI into existing products, Microsoft designed a new data platform from scratch to enable generative AI experiences within Fabric and support custom AI on other platforms.
This led to the integration of Copilot in Fabric from the outset. Copilot can assist users across all Fabric experiences, aiding in building data solutions, generating code, and answering questions to gain deeper insights from Power BI reports. Accenture, a global professional services leader, has made Copilot in Fabric available to its users. Accenture reported that through Microsoft Fabric, its employees can swiftly build different dashboards using natural language and Copilot in Power BI.
To underscore the productivity impact Microsoft customer Accenture reported that users who engaged with Copilot in Fabric completed standard data analysis tasks 52% faster and uncovered insights 36% more accurately. From my view, completing data analysis with increased speed allows organizations to make timely decisions, staying ahead in fast-paced markets and responding swiftly to emerging opportunities or challenges. Moreover, greater accuracy in uncovering insights ensures more reliable outcomes, reducing errors and enhancing confidence in strategic and operational choices.
Cosmos DB (NoSQL) in Fabric Ready to Accelerate App Development
Six months ago, Microsoft introduced Fabric Databases, a new type of SaaS database integrated into Fabric, designed for ease of deployment and management, enabling developers to accelerate application development. It began with SQL databases in Fabric, which can be set up in seconds for structured data, offering high availability and security by default.
As AI agents tackle more complex tasks, combining semi-structured data, such as text, documents, emails, and graphs, becomes essential for AI training. As such, Microsoft unveiled the expansion of Fabric Databases with the preview of Cosmos DB in Fabric to support semi-structured data. A recent Bloomberg CIO study named Azure Cosmos DB as the top choice for building GenAI applications.
By bringing this leading database technology to Fabric, developers can deploy a high-performance database with just a few clicks, benefiting from enterprise-grade dynamic scalability and 99.999% reliability. Supporting both SQL and NoSQL models, Cosmos DB in Fabric enables developers to create AI applications using operational, transactional, and analytical data. Additionally, Cosmos DB data is instantly accessible in OneLake for analytics, such as near real-time sentiment analysis for chat applications.
Digital Twin Builder in Microsoft Fabric Debuts
Microsoft introduced the preview of Digital Twin Builder in Microsoft Fabric, a new feature that allows organizations to create, manage, and visualize digital twins at scale. Integrated into Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, Digital Twin Builder offers a streamlined, no-code/low-code approach to developing and managing virtual models of real-world objects and processes.
From my perspective, digital twins are vital for cloud-based SaaS analytics platforms that aim to unify data management, analytics, and AI tools because they provide a dynamic, virtual representation of physical systems, processes, or assets, enabling real-time data integration, simulation, and predictive insights. By mirroring real-world entities in a digital environment, these platforms can aggregate and analyze diverse data streams, from IoT sensors to enterprise databases, within a cohesive framework.
This allows for the optimization of advanced analytics, such as predictive maintenance or performance optimization, while AI tools leverage the digital twin’s contextualized data to train models and generate actionable insights. The unified approach streamlines data management by reducing silos, enhances decision-making through accurate simulations, and accelerates innovation by enabling rapid testing of scenarios, making digital twins a cornerstone for delivering scalable, intelligent, and impactful SaaS solutions.
This capability makes digital twins more accessible and actionable for operators and decision-makers, enabling broader adoption and scalability. With integration across Microsoft Fabric, including OneLake and Power BI, organizations can gain insights from their entire data estate. The ability to converse with data enables teams to explore and analyze intricate datasets by simply asking questions, breaking down barriers to insights. I find this empowers everyone, from business analysts to data scientists, to make quicker, more confident decisions within their existing tools.
Microsoft Copilot Studio Enhance Custom Agents: Integrates Insights from Fabric Data Agents
Microsoft has unveiled data agents in Microsoft Fabric, AI-powered assistants that do more than just retrieve data from OneLake. These agents engage in natural language conversations, understanding the structure, meaning, and context of data to deliver timely, relevant, and actionable insights. By enabling users to interact with data intuitively, these agents make insights more accessible and actionable across various roles, enhancing decision-making within the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem.
Set to launch soon in public preview, Fabric data agents can be integrated into custom agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio and deployed across platforms like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Once connected, these custom agents leverage Fabric data agents to access insights from OneLake while adhering to data access permissions. Developers can further enhance functionality by defining actions, such as sending emails or triggering workflows, allowing users to automate processes and interact with data seamlessly within the chat experience.
One Lake: Accelerating the Preparation of AI-Ready Data
Now shortcut transformations enable data transformation as data is ingested into OneLake or transferred between OneLake data items, virtualizing it while converting it to the Delta Lake format or applying AI-driven transformations like summarization, translation, and document classification, all powered by Azure AI Foundry. With minimal effort, users can virtualize data in OneLake with just a few clicks, preparing it efficiently for analytics or AI applications.
Materialized lake views simplify the implementation of the Medallion architecture in Spark SQL by allowing users to create, schedule, and automate materialized views that manage queries across source tables or other views, delivering consistently up-to-date results with minimal manual intervention. By using just a few SQL statements, users can establish complex data pipelines, with Fabric’s materialized lake views automating the rest for streamlined data processing.
Microsoft Fabric: A Complete AI-powered Data Platform
From my point of view, Microsoft Fabric is more solidly positioned as an integrated, AI-driven data platform that promotes more efficient collaboration throughout organizations. Microsoft included additional new features and enhancements that further bolster the Fabric platform and its workloads, enabling greater opportunities for your data projects.
For instance, the Native Execution Engine, now generally available, allows Spark queries to execute natively on the customer’s lakehouse, delivering up to sixfold faster performance without requiring code modifications or risking vendor lock-in. This release includes built-in optimizations and resource profiles, enabling faster and more cost-efficient data engineering at scale.
The preview of real-time endpoints for ML models empowers data scientists to provide secure, real-time predictive insights from any registered ML model through scalable online endpoints, accessible by other Fabric engines or external applications for broad, reliable use. Additionally, the preview of Warehouse Snapshots offers a consistent view of data at a specific point in time, even during ETL processes, enhancing insights and supporting confident decision-making, while the general availability of Open Mirroring provides a fully supported, production-ready solution to bring data into Microsoft Fabric without lock-in.
Key Improvements Boost Business Users with AI-driven Capabilities
I find the preview of Translytical task flows represents a significant advancement in Power BI reports, Microsoft’s business intelligence platform that enables users to visualize, analyze, and share data through interactive dashboards, reports, and data models. As such, users can automate actions directly within reports to enhance decision-making and operational efficiency. This feature in Microsoft Fabric enables automation of tasks such as updating records, sending dynamic notifications, adding annotations, and initiating workflows across systems, streamlining processes seamlessly.
Moreover, the preview of AI prep features in Power BI improves Copilot’s ability to understand and process data, delivering more accurate, consistent, and verified responses by allowing users to incorporate specific business context, define verified answers, and curate the data accessible to Copilot. Additionally, Copilot and AI capabilities are now available across all paid Fabric SKUs, enabling customers on F2 and higher to leverage Copilot, Fabric data agents, and AI Functions to optimize workflows, generate insights, and make impactful decisions.
Microsoft Fabric: Providing an Open, AI-ready Data Lake
Of key importance, Microsoft is enhancing OneLake with several new features alongside shortcut transformations. The preview of shortcuts to Azure Blob Storage enables virtualization of all Blob data within OneLake, making it readily available for analytics projects across Fabric and AI initiatives in platforms such as Azure AI Foundry. Additionally, the upcoming preview of automatic and virtual Delta Lake to Apache Iceberg table format conversion can facilitate smooth integration of Fabric tables with services and engines supporting the Apache Iceberg format like Snowflake.
Further, the preview of the OneLake catalog Secure tab introduces a centralized interface for managing OneLake security roles, allowing users to oversee access to items, workspaces, and domains from a single location. I find these enhancements fully align with streamlining data management, improving interoperability, and strengthening security oversight within the OneLake ecosystem.
Looking Ahead
Overall I believe Microsoft Fabric distinguishes itself from competitors such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and Tableau by providing a cohesive, AI-driven SaaS analytics platform that integrates data management, analytics, and AI functionalities, streamlining operations and boosting efficiency. Its OneLake data lake centralizes storage, removing data silos and facilitating smooth data sharing across workloads such as Data Engineering, Data Science, Real-Time Analytics, and Power BI, eliminating the need for multiple tools or intricate integrations.
With over 150 pre-built connectors in Data Factory, Fabric supports multicloud environments (e.g., Azure, AWS, Google Cloud) and open formats like Delta Lake, preventing vendor lock-in and simplifying data access compared to the relatively disjointed ecosystems of competitors. Furthermore, its built-in integration with Microsoft 365 tools, including Teams and SharePoint, enhances collaboration and makes data accessible to both technical and non-technical users, a level of ecosystem synergy that competitors find challenging to replicate.
As a result, Microsoft Fabric is more firmly positioned than ever to enable workforces to effortlessly create diverse dashboards using natural language and Copilot in Power BI. This capability can fundamentally transform their daily work. Microsoft Fabric’s new capabilities can unlock data’s potential quickly with a unified analytics platform by unifying and integrating data management through a cohesive set of analytics tools, hosted on a lake-centric SaaS solution to ensure simplicity and a single, reliable source of truth.
Ron Westfall | Analyst In Residence
Ron Westfall is a prominent analyst figure in technology and business transformation. Recognized as a Top 20 Analyst by AR Insights and a Tech Target contributor, his insights are featured in major media such as CNBC, Schwab Network, and NMG Media.
His expertise covers transformative fields such as Hybrid Cloud, AI Networking, Security Infrastructure, Edge Cloud Computing, Wireline/Wireless Connectivity, and 5G-IoT. Ron bridges the gap between C-suite strategic goals and the practical needs of end users and partners, driving technology ROI for leading organizations.