The main takeaway from FabCon Europe in Barcelona was that Microsoft Fabric is expanding the ways businesses can use their data. Information prepared for reporting can increasingly support AI assistants, operational applications, and planning. The same investment can become useful in other parts of the business as well.
For leadership, this gives trusted well-governed data products greater strategic value. The opportunity is to build on reliable information and business knowledge as new ways of using them become available.
Trusted data products support your business needs
Fabric IQ is now available in Microsoft Copilot Chat and Cowork, connecting AI to the same governed data and Power BI reports your organization already relies on. Now you can get answers about your revenue, margins and other metrics instantly without waiting for reports.
This makes building trusted and well-governed data products increasingly relevant. The work involved in understanding business needs, agreeing on definitions, and making data dependable creates something that can be reused as the platform develops.
For example, a well-defined sales data product could support management reporting, help answer questions through Copilot, and provide information for an operational application. Each additional use gives the original investment another opportunity to deliver value.
Analytics is moving closer to the decisions and actions it supports
Microsoft has previewed app building in Power BI Desktop with integrated planning capabilities that connect budgets, forecasts, and decisions to your analytical data.
A sales manager could review a margin exception, record a decision, and initiate an approval in the same application. This eliminates the manual handoffs between reviewing data and acting on it.
For businesses, this is a reason to examine what happens after someone opens a report. Spreadsheet exports, repeated data entry, and email-based approvals can reveal opportunities for improvement. Reusing trusted data products gives these applications a foundation of established information and business logic.
A connected data environment supports gradual modernization
Fabric's expanding ecosystem makes it easier to use information across different data platforms, giving organizations more flexibility in how they modernize their data environment.
A valuable use case, such as, improving forecast accuracy and or reducing reporting delays, can provide a focused starting point with further capabilities added as the benefits become clear. Existing investments, integration requirements, and operating costs still need to guide the architecture. Access to more data becomes useful when it supports a defined business need.
AI assistance makes business understanding and validation increasingly important
Fabric’s new data engineering agent was announced in preview. The engineering agent can handle extended tasks like migrations and data preparation automatically.
This can accelerate implementation, but it also increases the importance of knowing what to build and how to evaluate the results.
Business experts and engineers need to establish whether the output reflects the business correctly and can be relied on. Trusted data products, with defined expectations and accountable owners, provide a useful basis for that evaluation.
Reliable operations remain essential as usage grows
Microsoft is supporting operational needs with improved deployment planning, monitoring, and on-demand billing options.
When a data product serves several reports, applications, or AI experiences, its quality and availability affect more people. Ownership, controlled changes, monitoring, support, and cost visibility deserve attention as usage expands. The business case should include maintaining the service as well as building it.
The main message from FabCon is that trusted data is becoming reusable across more business scenarios.
A practical next step is to identify an existing data product or business process and ask where else it could create value. What additional decisions could it support? Which manual steps could it remove? Which AI, planning, or operational use cases could benefit from the same foundation?
Fabric's direction gives organizations more ways to put trusted data to work without rebuilding that foundation every time new capabilities emerge.
Want to understand what this means for your organization? Contact us or send us a message, we'd be happy to think it through with you.
