Microsoft Makes Fabric the Enterprise AI Context Layer
It grounds Copilot answers in governed Power BI semantic models to help companies run, monitor and control AI on their own data.
Overview
- Fabric IQ became generally available in Microsoft Copilot Chat and Copilot Cowork on Tuesday, letting Copilot answer business questions using the same governed Power BI semantic models that teams already trust.
- IQ Sharing entered preview to let organizations and partners securely share governed data and the business context that gives it meaning while preserving access controls over underlying assets.
- Microsoft put Observability in Fabric, Fabric Apps, Database Hub and agentic data engineering into preview to give teams cross-workspace monitoring, production-ready app tooling, a central database control plane and AI-assisted automation for data pipelines.
- SQL Server on Azure Local reached general availability with a disconnected-operations preview to let customers run SQL Server and Azure services in local or offline environments for data sovereignty and regulated deployments.
- Analysts say Microsoft’s advantage is distribution through Power BI and Copilot but they urge stronger interoperability with other clouds and data platforms as competitors like Databricks, Snowflake, AWS and Google pursue similar context-layer strategies.