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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
Join us this year in Las Vegas for FabCon 2025.
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 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.
In addition to OneLake Security, we are also making enhancements to OneLake, including:
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:
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:
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.
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.
- 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 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.