Co-authored with Bogdan Crivat, Microsoft CVP Synapse Analytics
REDMOND, WA – Nov 15, 2023, – Today, we are pleased to announce the groundbreaking integration between Azure AI and Microsoft Fabric, ushering in a new era of AI-driven innovation across digital landscapes. This combination empowers organizations to confidently build and scale generative AI solutions, grounded on their data in Microsoft Fabric. This integration – achieved by enabling Azure AI to operate on OneLake, opens endless possibilities for AI and app developers, data engineers, data scientists, and business users to interact using natural language to uncover insights from their data.
Microsoft Fabric: Your data platform for the era of AI
Microsoft Fabric, now generally available, is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, all in one place. This unified architecture also simplifies governing and securing your data and billing with a single pool of capacity and storage that can be used for every workload.
Fabric is lake-centric and open – Fabric’s unified multi-cloud data lake, OneLake, is automatically wired into every Fabric workload and designed to help you simplify data management and reduce data duplication.
The modern data estate spans across multiple clouds, accounts, databases, domains, and engines, making it hard to pull insights from a unified set of data. With Microsoft Fabric, we’ve simplified how you bring data into OneLake through multiple Fabric capabilities:
- Data Factory empowers you with a modern data integration experience to ingest, prepare and transform data from a rich set of data sources. Whether you are a citizen or professional developer, you will be able to transform the data with intelligent transformations and leverage a rich set of activities.
- Shortcuts enable your data teams to virtualize data in OneLake without having to move and duplicate the data. You can use shortcuts to combine data that lives across your different clouds, accounts, lines of businesses and domains into a virtualized data product tailored to your specific needs. Shortcuts can today access data in OneLake, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Amazon S3, and Microsoft Dataverse, and this list will continue to evolve.
- Mirroring (preview) is a new, frictionless way to add and manage existing cloud data warehouses and databases in Fabric’s Synapse Data Warehouse experience. Mirroring replicates a snapshot of the database to OneLake in Delta Parquet tables and keeps the replica in sync in near real time.
- Microsoft Managed Data – Fabric makes it easier to analyze the vast amount of work data you have in Microsoft 365 with native integration into Microsoft Graph.
Fabric translates insights into impact with native integration with Microsoft 365 by bringing together data for collaborating and doing ad-hoc analysis. Unified governance, security, and compliance is built in for all your data with Microsoft Purview. Copilot for Microsoft Fabric, now Public Preview, is infused throughout Fabric experiences, empowering you to be even more productive with generative AI—whether it’s writing Spark statements, building models and BI reports, or building dataflows to extract and transform data.
Azure AI Studio: Your Gateway to Develop Generative AI Applications and Custom Copilots
Azure AI enables developers to shape the future with AI. Azure AI Studio, a unified platform, is a great way to modernize and build AI applications at scale. The platform is a one-stop-shop to seamlessly explore, build, evaluate, and deploy AI solutions using state-of-the-art tools, grounded in responsible AI practices. Developers can build custom copilots, using out-of-the-box and customizable templates and models. Azure AI Search can chunk, index, and store vector embeddings from any data source. With the comprehensive model catalog, developers can select from a wide range of frontier and open-source models. They can create and evaluate prompt flows with LLMOps, customize models, and scale proof of concepts (PoCs) into full production with continuous monitoring and refinement.
Fabric + Azure AI = Boundless Possibilities
The integration of Azure AI’s capabilities with Microsoft Fabric empowers developers to unlock the full potential of their data estates. Developers can build their own custom AI apps and models directly over OneLake, having access to their entire data estate. This offers many opportunities for generative AI use cases across various industries.
- Enhance data insights: Leverage advanced data visualizations and analytics, customers can develop enterprise chat capabilities to uncover insights from structured and unstructured data with natural language. Detect patterns, trends, and anomalies effectively. Create a conversational interface to reason over business data, navigate product catalogs, respond to customer queries, and aid in decision-making processes.
- Ground your AI on your structured and unstructured data: Ensure that your AI is using the latest data in its interactions with your employees, partners, and customers.
- Analyze customer interactions: Access real-time analytics to enhance customer service, tailor support responses, make data-driven decisions to enhance overall customer satisfaction and support efficiency with speech analytics capabilities. Detect language, summarize content, analyze sentiment, and convert insights into vector embeddings for future access in search queries.
- Customize machine learning models: Tailor models to specific business needs, whether it’s predictive maintenance, fraud detection, or customer sentiment analysis. Azure AI Studio, Azure Machine Learning, and Microsoft Fabric empower developers and data scientists to create custom models that fit their business requirements, grounded on their enterprise data in OneLake.
Unleash the Power of your Data Estate
The impressive toolkit allows developers to harness the full potential of their data estates, driving innovation. Data scientists and business leaders can use intelligent solutions to confidently make real-time data-driven decisions. Azure AI and Microsoft Fabric integration goes beyond data management to transform data into a strategic asset that fuels AI-driven success.
Unlock a realm of new possibilities for your organization in the era of AI with the integration of Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI. Explore the potential, innovate, and thrive in the new digital landscape.
Ready to learn more?
Access the Azure AI Studio to get building! We have also prepared a software development kit (SDK), set of documentation, and training modules to get you started:
- Azure AI Studio preview
- Azure AI SDK
- Azure AI Studio documentation
- Introduction to Azure AI Studio (Learn module)
If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:
- Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
- Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website.
- Reading more in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
- Exploring the Fabric technical documentation.
- Attending the Supercharge organizational analytics and democratize insights webinar to get an end-to-end view of Microsoft Fabric.
- Joining the Fabric community
- Learning more about Azure Innovate, our new offering to help you adopt AI
