From Data Platform to Intelligence Platform: Introducing Microsoft Fabric IQ
The organizations winning today are not merely collecting more data. They are the organizations turning data into intelligence, and intelligence into action. They are building systems that observe, understand, and reason about the business in real time and at machine scale and then act to drive and advance business outcomes. That is the shift from data platforms to intelligence platforms, and it is redefining competitive advantage.
Today at Microsoft Ignite 2025, we are announcing the next step in the evolution of Microsoft Fabric: Fabric IQ, a unified intelligence platform powered by semantic understanding and agentic AI. This is not a replacement for your data estate. It is a force multiplier for every investment you have already made.
What We’ve Built: The Foundation
Over the past two years, Microsoft Fabric has reshaped the data landscape and laid the groundwork for leveraging enterprise AI.
We started by expanding the proven SaaS foundation of Power BI, the world’s most widely adopted BI platform with over 20 million semantic models in use, into a fully unified data platform. Fabric brought data pipelines, engineering, warehousing, science, and analytics together into a single SaaS platform with OneLake at the core. This eliminated silos and tool sprawl and created a single, governed data estate for the entire organization.
We then moved beyond reporting to real-time actions with Real-Time Intelligence, enabling organizations to stream, analyze, and act on live data in seconds rather than hours or days, giving both teams and AI alike the ability to shape outcomes, not just observe them. This shift is already transforming how our customers operate.
Shuai Zhang, Senior Manager of Analytics at Qcells North America, reflected on the impact of this shift:
“With Fabric Real-Time Intelligence and Power BI in our Fleet Manager platform, we now have live visibility into thousands of residential, commercial, and utility customer sites, instantaneously.”
Dr. Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director at Apollo Hospitals, highlighted a similar transformation:
“At Apollo Hospitals, our mission has always been to merge the art of healing with the science of data. With Fabric Real Time Intelligence, we are bringing that vision to life unifying data across the continuum of care and transforming it into real-time intelligence that empowers clinicians, enhances operational excellence, and delivers predictive, patient-centered outcomes. This collaboration marks a defining moment in our digital transformation journey, where healthcare moves from being reactive to truly proactive, and where every decision is informed by intelligence that is immediate, integrated, and impactful.”
Next, we expanded Fabric beyond time to space and relationships with Maps, Graph, and Digital Twin Builder, so customers can go beyond understanding what just happened, gaining a comprehensive view through also knowing where it happened, how things are connected, and how disruptions cascade across assets, supply chains, and operations.
We also introduced Fabric Databases, allowing developers to build operational apps on the same platform that powers analytics and AI, with live data instantly available across the estate.
The result is a single, connected data foundation—one data estate, one platform, one source of truth—used by hundreds of thousands of organizations to consolidate tools, democratize insights, and power the next generation of intelligent applications and AI agents.
And now, we are ready to take this to the next level: turning unified data into unified intelligence.
The Opportunity: When Data Becomes Understanding
The next frontier is not more data. It is shared understanding over that data.
Consider how an airline operates. Nobody thinks in tables or schemas. Leaders and teams think in the terms of their business: planes, passengers, routes, gates, crews, delays, and outcomes. They think about relationships and semantics- how things connect, which policies apply, what goals matter, and what actions change results. They uphold safety as the top priority, while balancing cost, speed, capacity, efficiency, and customer experience in real time.
None of that meaning lives in today’s data systems. The semantics of the business live in people’s heads. Every team has its own definitions, reports, and slice of the truth. No shared model. No shared business language. No way to see, let alone optimize, the business end-to-end. AI faces the same limitation. It can read the data, but it does not understand your business. Without that grounding, AI cannot reason about cascading effects, constraints, or objectives. It cannot make decisions you can trust because it lacks context, policy, and meaning.
Both teams and AI need the same thing: a shared, connected, real-time understanding of the business.
That is what we are unlocking today with Fabric IQ: elevating every team and every AI agent to reason, decide, and act in the language of the business, powered by a live, unified view of the enterprise.
Announcing Microsoft Fabric IQ: The Semantic Intelligence Platform
Microsoft Fabric IQ is the new semantic intelligence layer that elevates Fabric from a unified data platform to a unified intelligence platform. It turns your unified data estate, already consolidated in OneLake, into a live, structured, connected model of how your business operates. It bridges the gap between where your data lives and how your teams and AI reason, decide, and act.
The impact is already being seen in the field. As Josh Watmough, Director of System Operations at ENMAX Power, explains:
“ENMAX Power is excited to leverage Ontology in Fabric IQ to unify transmission and distribution grid data, overcoming the limitations of traditional relational databases that silo information and complicate real-time analysis. By structuring relationships between assets, events, and operational domains such as weather, outage management, GIS, and SCADA we are empowered to build a foundation for advanced forecasting, risk evaluation, and transparent decision-making. This approach streamlines grid optimization and outage mitigation, while democratizing data for partners and field teams, enabling scalable, efficient, and resilient grid operations.”
Unlike traditional data modeling, creating the ontology in Fabric IQ is fully democratized. Business experts can build and evolve the model themselves using no-code visual tools, instead of waiting on specialist engineers. Organizations can jumpstart their ontology using their existing Power BI models. The ontology can adapt as the business evolves, without long engineering cycles. At the same time, it is still fully governed using the built-in capabilities of Fabric. IT can secure, approve, version, and manage it, while the business enriches the meaning.
Fabric IQ combines five integrated capabilities into one semantic intelligence system:
- Ontology: shared model of business entities, relationships, rules, and objectives
- Semantic Model: trusted BI definitions, now extended beyond analytics into operations and AI
- Graph: native graph engine for multi-hop reasoning and system-wide insights
- Data Agent: virtual analysts that answer business questions using structured business meaning
- Operations Agent: autonomous agents that reason, learn, and act in real time to advance outcomes
Together, these make Fabric IQ far more than a modeling tool. It becomes the semantic backbone for every team, application, and AI agent. It gives AI the same business awareness as your most experienced experts, but operates continuously, at machine scale, making decisions in seconds, not days.
Tony DeBos, Senior Vice President at Kyndryl, sees this shift as foundational to trustworthy AI:
“At Kyndryl, trust that Agentic AI will consistently make sound decisions is essential. Fabric IQ lets us define an ontology that equips our agents to make decisions grounded in business understanding and live operational context, while also making it faster to develop and tune them. We apply Microsoft’s security, trust, governance, and compliance capabilities to manage and secure the ontology that powers agents in production.”
Fabric IQ is where data, meaning, and action converge, transforming Microsoft Fabric from a unified data platform into a unified intelligence platform.
Introducing Ontology in Fabric IQ: The Semantic Foundation
At the foundation of Fabric IQ is the Ontology item. It defines a formal model of your business that captures the things that matter, how they relate, what rules govern them, and what actions can be taken on them. It becomes the shared language that both teams and AI can use to reason about the business and act in real time.
These are the key business concepts captured or enabled by the ontology:
- Entity Types: Real-world or abstract concepts that your business manages (e.g., Plane, Flight, Pilot).
- Relationship Types: How entity types relate (e.g., Passenger booked on Flight, Pilot certified for Aircraft Type).
- Properties: Facts that describes their state (example: location, fuel level, aircraft model).
- Actions: Operations that can be performed on entities (example: reroute aircraft, schedule repair, notify pilot).
- Rules: Event-driven triggers that initiate actions (example: if connection time < 20 min, then rebook passengers).
But the ontology is not static or merely conceptual. It is live. Every entity, relationship, property, and rule is connected to real data in OneLake across analytical, real-time, time series, geospatial, graph, and other engines in Fabric. Every action is connected to the workflows in operational systems that execute it.
The result: a real-time, structured view of your business that teams and AI can query, monitor, reason over, and act on, elevating how they think and act to the language of your business.
Unlike traditional data modeling, creating the ontology in Fabric IQ is fully democratized. Business experts can build and evolve the model themselves using no-code visual tools, instead of waiting on specialist engineers. Organizations can jumpstart their ontology using their existing Power BI models. The ontology can adapt as the business evolves, without long engineering cycles. At the same time, it is still fully governed using the built-in capabilities of Fabric. IT can secure, approve, version, and manage it, while the business enriches the meaning.
Introducing Operations Agent: Autonomous Intelligence at Scale
As part of Fabric IQ, we are introducing the Operations Agent item to drive continuous, autonomous action using the semantic foundation from the Ontology item. Where Data Agents democratize access to insight, Operations Agents democratize operational decision-making. They monitor the business in real time, reason over live conditions, evaluate trade-offs, and take actions automatically to advance business outcomes.
The agent watches live signals across every entity, interprets what changes mean within the full business context, decides the best action based on policies and objectives, takes those actions across operational systems, and learns from every result to improve the next decision.
This is a new class of enterprise AI, not one that just flags issues, but one that runs operations. Decisions are context-aware, grounded in shared business semantics, not raw streams. Optimization is objective-driven, balancing cost, speed, risk, and customer impact. Autonomy is governed, and humans are kept in the loop as decisions are made, so organizations control what runs automatically, what requires approval, and what is simply observed. Intelligence compounds with every cycle.
This is not alerting. This is not workflow automation. This is agentic AI with business understanding, decision authority, and grounding in the real-time business context.
With Ontology + Operations Agent, enterprises move from reactive operations to proactive, real-time, intelligent responses. Instead of waiting for issues to surface in reports, the agent detects risks and opportunities as they form and intervenes in time to make a difference. Decisions that once took meetings and manual coordination now happen in seconds. Routine tasks run autonomously, freeing teams to focus on judgment and strategy. Because everything runs on the same semantic model, actions are aligned and system-wide, not fragmented across silos.
This shift unlocks a new class of operational capabilities that were previously too slow, too manual, or too complex to execute at scale. Instead of reacting after the fact, the business can continuously rebalance, enforce, adapt, and respond in real time to optimize the whole system.
Extending Intelligence Across the Microsoft Ecosystem
Fabric IQ does not live in isolation. It becomes exponentially more powerful when combined with Foundry IQ in Microsoft Foundry and Work IQ in Microsoft 365, forming a shared intelligence layer that spans business data, documents, communications, and enterprise knowledge.
Microsoft Foundry enables developers to build advanced, orchestrated agents that plan, reason, and act across systems. Instead of starting from a blank slate, these AI agents inherit live business context from Fabric IQ through Foundry IQ, including the ontology and the real-time state of the business.
Every agent now understands the business, not merely has access to the data. They reason using the same model and definitions as teams. Multiple agents and teams can collaborate on a shared foundation, exchanging context instead of pulling in conflicting directions. Developers can build agents that already know what concepts like a plane, route, and passenger means, dramatically reducing grounding and prompt engineering.
Fabric IQ provides a real-time operational model of the business grounded in OneLake. Foundry IQ extends that model with a knowledge graph across documents, emails, and content so agents can reason over institutional knowledge, not only operational and analytical data. Work IQ brings the knowledge from Microsoft 365, built over the rich information flowing through the organization every day, including documents, emails, and chats.
Together, Fabric IQ + Foundry IQ + Work IQ form IQ, a unified intelligence layer from Microsoft across its data, application, and productivity stack. Agents built in this ecosystem gain unmatched context, enabling decisions you can trust and continuous optimization of your operations for superior outcomes.
What’s New in Real-Time Intelligence
The Fabric Real-Time Intelligence offering continues to evolve with the fully released Fabric Graph, Maps updates with imagery and labelling, advanced actions in Activator, new Eventstream sources, Eventhouse endpoint for warehouse, Eventhouse entity diagram, and many more. To learn more about planned features, see the release plan.
The Opportunity: Redefining Competitive Advantage
Fabric began by unifying the data estate and data platform. Then it introduced real-time intelligence, geospatial insight, graph analytics, and databases. Now, it is unlocking the next frontier with Fabric IQ: transforming unified data into unified intelligence that understands your business and acts to advance your objectives.
The organizations that make this shift do not just move faster. They compete on a different plane of advantage:
- Operations become continuously self-optimizing, adapting the moment conditions change.
- Decisions shift from retrospective to real time, driven by AI with full semantic understanding of the business.
- People move to higher-value work, including strategy, creativity, and exception handling, while AI handles time-critical, repeatable, precision-dependent tasks at machine speed and scale.
- Advantage shifts from owning more data to unifying intelligence that turns data into outcomes.
What sets Fabric IQ apart is not just what it enables, but the foundation it is built on. It is designed for real-world adoption, rooted in a platform that hundreds of thousands of organizations already use today.
What sets Fabric IQ apart is its strategic foundation. It layers over the unified data platform already in Fabric, jumpstarts the ontology from the 30+ million Power BI models in use today, natively provides no-code experience for business users, requires no new licensing to adopt, and ultimately integrates seamlessly with Foundry IQ and Work IQ to provide a semantic foundation across business data, documents, emails, and enterprise knowledge.
The next market leaders will not be the ones with the most dashboards or the largest data lake, but the ones who most effectively turn data into understanding, understanding into action, and action into sustained advantage.
With Microsoft Fabric IQ, that shift begins now.
Join Us at FabCon Atlanta
Excited about Fabric? Join us at FabCon in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 16-20, 2026. Register and use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of the current Early Access pricing!
Explore Additional Resources
Watch Ignite sessions
- BRK1702: Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databases – the data estate for AI (Tue, Nov 18, 2:30–3:15 PM)
- BRK224: Microsoft Fabric: The data platform for the next AI frontier (Tue, Nov 18, 3:45–4:30 PM)
- BRK222: Microsoft Fabric IQ: Turning unified data into unified intelligence (Wed, Nov 19, 10:15–11:00 AM)
- BRK226: Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the era of AI (Wed, Nov 19, 2:45–3:30 PM)
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Learn more (Fabric IQ)
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