New Microsoft Fabric capabilities deliver next-gen AI readiness

We're in a hinge moment for AI. The experiments are over and the real work has begun. Centralizing data, once the finish line, is now the starting point. The definition of "AI readiness" is evolving as increasingly sophisticated agents demand rich, contextualized data grounded in business operations to deliver meaningful results. What sets leaders apart is the quality of the data platform experience in delivering on the shared meaning, live context and interactivity that helps systems understand the business as it is, not just as a static report. Across industries, frontier firms are dissolving silos and equipping teams with AI agents and reasoning systems that go beyond answers to help people build, explore, decide and act. The result: a new rhythm of work that's faster, more connected, more explainable and closer to the customer.

Microsoft Fabric: Powering AI-Ready data innovation enterprise-wide at FabCon Europe

As the first hyperscaler to fully embrace this paradigm, Microsoft is introducing new capabilities in its fastest-growing data and analytics platform, Microsoft Fabric, at the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon). With Fabric, we are bringing together all of an organization's data into a single, AI-ready foundation so every team can turn data into actionable insight with the full context of their business. At FabCon, Microsoft is announcing a major leap forward in its delivery of AI data readiness with Graph in Fabric, a low/no-code platform for modeling and analyzing relationships across enterprise data; and Maps in Fabric, which joins the recently launched digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric as part of Real-Time Intelligence and brings geospatial analytics into Fabric, enabling users to visualize and enrich location-based data at scale.

We're also expanding Fabric's capabilities further with new OneLake shortcuts and mirroring sources, a Graph database connecting entities across OneLake, enhanced developer experiences and new security controls - providing everything needed to run mission-critical scenarios on Fabric.

These capabilities mark a fundamental evolution in data strategy for business leaders scaling intelligent AI applications and agents across their organizations.

Train smarter agents with Graph and Maps

The foundation of every successful AI agent isn't just data - it's organized knowledge. As businesses accelerate into the AI era, the challenge isn't gathering more information, but structuring it so agents can reason, connect and act with purpose.

The previews of Graph and Maps in Fabric are designed to help businesses organize their raw data for real-world impact. Graph in Fabric draws on the graph design principles proven at LinkedIn to reveal connections across customers, partners and supply chains, enabling organizations to visualize and query relationships that drive business outcomes.

Maps in Fabric brings geospatial analytics, empowering teams to make location-aware decisions as they respond to operational challenges in real time.

But these aren't just technical milestones, they're strategic tools for business leaders. AI is sparking new cross-company collaboration by connecting enterprise data - uniting business functions, accelerating decisions and empowering teams to share and scale value through open data flow. Whether it's mapping supply chain dependencies or visualizing customer journeys, Graph and Maps help businesses move from isolated data points to a connected, actionable foundation for AI.

Discover how Graph and Maps in Fabric unlock real-time intelligence for AI-driven operations. Get the engineering inside scoop from Corporate Vice President of Messaging and Real-Time Analytics, Yitzhak Kesselman, in his latest blog: "The Foundation for Powering AI-Driven Operations."

Enhancing developer experiences across Fabric to accelerate AI projects

Fabric is quickly becoming the go-to platform for data developers worldwide. To fuel that momentum, we're rolling out new tools that make it easier to build, automate and innovate.

The new Fabric Extensibility Toolkit simplifies architecture and automation - so every solution is secure, scalable and aligned to business needs. And with the preview of Fabric Model Context Protocol (MCP) developers can tap into AI-assisted code generation and item authoring right inside familiar environments like Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces.

These updates aren't just for software developers. They're for any business leader ready to turn organized data into competitive advantage. Fabric helps teams move from experimentation to enterprise-scale impact, with speed and governance built in.

OneLake: The AI-Ready data foundation

OneLake is the unified data lake at the heart of Fabric. It's designed to ingest data once and make it instantly usable across analytics, AI and applications to accelerate insight. Today, we're introducing new features to give teams unprecedented visibility and control with OneLake.

With the addition of mirroring capabilities for Oracle and Google BigQuery, expanded support for data agents and OneLake shortcuts to Azure Blob Storage, organizations can bring all their data together, no matter where it lives.

OneLake shortcut transformations can now convert JSON and Parquet files to Delta tables for instant analysis. OneLake also offers secure governance tools, including a new Secure tab in the catalog for managing permissions and a Govern tab for data oversight.

We're also releasing the Azure AI Search integration with OneLake. By making this available in the Azure AI Foundry portal, we're streamlining the experience for developers and data teams, helping them build smarter, more context-aware agents faster.

Our OneLake Table API preview allows apps to discover and inspect tables using Fabric's security model, and OneLake diagnostics, enabling workspace owners to capture all data activity and storage operations.

Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Foundry: A complete data, AI and agent ecosystem

In the AI era, every project is a data project, and success depends on reducing complexity. Microsoft is addressing this head-on by continuing to natively integrate Fabric and Azure AI Foundry together to help simplify how enterprises design, customize and manage AI apps and agents.

Fabric provides a single way to reason over data wherever it resides, delivering the structured, contextualized foundation AI needs. On top of that foundation, Azure AI Foundry enables developers to work with their favorite tools, including GitHub, Visual Studio and Copilot Studio, to efficiently build and scale AI applications and agents, while giving IT leaders visibility into performance, governance and ROI.

By bringing data, models and operations together, Fabric and Azure AI Foundry help businesses accelerate innovation and align AI initiatives with strategic goals. This unified approach eliminates complexity, speeds adoption and creates a platform-first advantage so organizations can unlock new value from their data and lead in the next generation of AI readiness.

Build the foundation, lead the future

The organizations leading this next chapter aren't just deploying AI, they're engineering for it. That starts with a foundation where data is unified, governed and now enriched with context so AI apps and agents can act confidently and scale without friction. Graph and Maps, enhanced developer tools, OneLake improvements and integration with Azure AI Foundry push Microsoft Fabric past data unification into AI-ready, context-rich data built for tomorrow's AI challenges.

Those organizations are also skilling up. Thousands of Fabric users have passed their exams to achieve more than 50,000 certifications collectively for Foundry, Fabric Analytics Engineers and Fabric Data Engineers roles.

The future of AI belongs to platforms, not point solutions - ecosystems that connect data, intelligence and action. With that foundation, every agent, app and insight compounds value. Microsoft delivers that platform today, helping organizations unlock new levels of intelligence and impact.

Explore the full spectrum of new features coming to Fabric in today's blog from Arun Ulagaratchagan, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data: "FabCon Vienna: Build data-rich agents on an enterprise-ready foundation."

Tags: AI, Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, GitHub, GitHub Codespaces, Microsoft Fabric, OneLake, Visual Studio Code