The Foundation for Powering AI-Driven Operations: Fabric Real-Time Intelligence
Every organization shares the same ambitions: to deliver better outcomes, increase efficiency, mitigate risks, and seize opportunities before they are lost. These ambitions underpin growth, resilience, agility, and lasting competitive advantage.
Yet most organizations struggle to harness the full value of their data to realize those ambitions. Massive volumes of granular signals flow in constantly from warehouses, stores, customers, factories, vehicles, applications, and other entities, but most go unused. Hidden in this flood are the signals that matter most: the customer about to churn, the machine about to break down, the shipment about to be delayed. Too often they go undetected, or actions come too late to change the outcome.
The barriers are well-known. Data arrives too late. Volumes are overwhelming. Batch and real-time systems remain siloed. Humans struggle to track the countless entities moving through operations and to isolate all the high-value signals and act in time to make a difference.
This is where AI changes the equation. AI can process signals at scale, identify the ones that matter, and determine the right action in the moment. The question every leader must now confront is: how can AI transform how my organization operates to unlock real value and deliver outcomes?
The age of Agentic AI: from reactive to proactive at scale
We are now in the fourth great evolution of software. The first was client–server. The second was cloud. The third was software-as-a-service (SaaS). And today we are entering the fourth: agentic AI.
Unlike the narrow applications of chatbots or content generation, the real revolution is unfolding in operations. With agentic AI, applications no longer stop at predefined reports, forms, and workflows. They act as intelligent systems that observe, reason, adapt, and act autonomously.
Two types of AI make this shift possible. Analytical AI identifies the signals that matter by uncovering patterns, anomalies, and trends, explaining what happened and why. Agentic AI goes further, interpreting those signals, making decisions, and acting in time to change outcomes. The true transformation comes from combining the two: creating agents that not only detect what matters but also take the right timely action.
But intelligence is only as good as the data it is built on. AI cannot operate in a vacuum. It needs up-to-date data and rich context: how events unfold across time and space, how systems interconnect, and how operations run. Without that foundation, their decisions will be incomplete or outdated.
For too long, operations have been reactive, analyzing data after the fact and responding when it was already too late, if at all. Now, leading businesses across industries are breaking the cycle: airlines dynamically adjust schedules, retailers respond instantly to demand shifts, manufacturers prevent costly downtime, hospitals improve patient flow in real time. They are turning signals into outcomes, moving from reactive firefighting to proactive, autonomous decision-making.
Their advantage comes from one source: Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric, delivering the fresh unified data, contextual understanding, and AI capabilities that make AI-powered operations a reality.
Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric
Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric makes it simple to build complete event-driven solutions: from capturing signals the moment they happen, to analyzing them in real time, to modeling assets and systems as digital twins, to visualizing insights, and to triggering alerts and actions instantly. It places every signal in context with the rest of your data in Fabric and powers AI agents with fresh intelligence.
With its low- and no-code experiences, what once required advanced expertise and complex integrations is now accessible to any team, forming the operational nervous system of the modern enterprise.
This simplicity does not come at the expense of scale and governance. Real-Time Intelligence runs on the same planet-scale infrastructure that powers Microsoft and Azure.
Live data flows into OneLake as a unified, governed estate, seamlessly combines with historical context, and becomes actionable in Power BI, Teams, Power Automate, and thousands of connected systems. Business users can build dashboards with Copilot and define triggers, while developers extend with APIs and pro-code tools. As a native Fabric workload, Real-Time Intelligence inherits shared governance, lineage, and security, ensuring real-time workloads scale safely across the enterprise.
Today, Fabric Real-Time Intelligence delivers building blocks for rapidly creating complete, event-driven applications and provides the foundation for the shift to agentic AI:
- Eventstream: capture and transform streaming data from any source.
- Eventhouse: store and query petabytes of events at scale with lightning-fast performance.
- KQL Queryset: author and share reusable queries for real-time analysis.
- Real-Time Dashboard: visualize key signals and insights as they unfold.
- Copilot: use natural language to generate queries, uncover insights, and build dashboards.
- Digital Twin Builder: model assets, entities, and processes for operational intelligence.
- Activator: detect conditions in live data and trigger alerts or workflows.
- Real-Time Hub: discover and manage all your events in one place.
Customer and partner momentum
Real-Time Intelligence is the fastest-growing workload in Microsoft Fabric, with nearly half of Fabric’s 24,000+ customers already using it and adoption growing 6x in the past year. This momentum reflects a simple truth: organizations everywhere are under pressure to move from reactive operations to proactive, real-time intelligence, and they are turning to Real-Time Intelligence to make it happen.
This platform is rapidly delivering transformative impact for both direct-to-consumer (DTC) innovators and business-to-business (B2B) enterprise leaders. It is powering seamless, event-driven operations whether it is real-time passenger flows, baggage tracking, omnichannel retail, hospital logistics, or supply chain automation, for organizations of every size and vertical.
Direct-to-consumer pioneers are reimagining their customer experience with real-time data. In hospitality, Valamar is delighting guests with seamless multi-modal check-in and check-out across touchpoints. In aviation, Emirates is reimagining passenger flows in real time, while Avinor is enabling real-time baggage tracking to improve airport efficiency and passenger experience. In food delivery and quick commerce, Swiggy is processing countless orders every hour across India. As Madhusudan Rao, CTO of Swiggy, explains: “Fabric’s Real-Time Intelligence empowers us to analyze clickstream and operational data instantly, helping us detect anomalies, and keep our promise of speed to millions of customers.”
For B2B enterprise innovators, the gains are just as profound. In retail, Iceland Foods is streamlining operations across both stores and supply chains. In healthcare, Apollo Hospitals is improving patient flow and care delivery.In manufacturing, Owens Corning is optimizing production at scale. In energy, Veolia is managing critical resources with greater efficiency.In distribution, Sonepar is enabling smarter, more responsive logistics for professional customers across 40 countries. And in pharmaceuticals, Fresenius is advancing quality and safety with real-time responsiveness.
This dual-spectrum impact across consumer brands and enterprise leaders shows how Real-Time Intelligence adapts to the evolving needs of every organization in today’s AI era. And this is only the beginning.
This momentum is amplified by a powerful partner ecosystem. More than 40,000 consultants worldwide have been trained on Real-Time Intelligence, supported by over 6,500 partner organizations and 95 Featured Partners delivering real-time solutions.
Powering industrial and physical AI with Real-Time Intelligence
As the digital world accelerates into the fourth era of software, the physical world must evolve just as quickly. Asset-heavy industries, such as manufacturing, energy, logistics, and others, cannot afford to be left behind. The business stakes are high: operational efficiency, resilience, and returns on capital now depend on the ability to sense and act in real time.
Leaders are already demonstrating what is possible with Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. Owens Corning is optimizing production at scale. Veolia is managing resources with greater efficiency. Hanwha is shifting from manufacturing-centric operations to service-led business models. And Sonepar is transforming supply chain responsiveness across 40 countries, meeting rising customer expectations with instant, data-driven action.
Yann Shah, VP of Data, Analytics & AI at Sonepar, underscores the urgency: “At Sonepar, real-time capabilities are essential. Our professional customers, spanning 40 countries, demand immediate responses, and our e-commerce platform must meet these expectations. With Microsoft Fabric and Real-Time Intelligence, we convert live data into swift actions.”
The opportunity goes far beyond asset monitoring and supply chain responsiveness. The next era of industrial AI will be defined by digital twins, semantic understanding, and agentic AI working together to make operations proactive and autonomous.
Microsoft and NVIDIA are collaborating to accelerate the next era of industrial and physical AI. The integration of NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries and OpenUSD with Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence brings real-time operational insights, agentic AI, and physically accurate digital twins to industrial operations. Sight Machine, a developer of industrial AI solutions, is leveraging Fabric Real-Time Intelligence and NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries technologies to build advanced AI-powered digital twins for the automotive, pharmaceutical, and process industries. These solutions empower manufacturers to unlock new possibilities in observability and bring greater intelligence and automation to operations. Learn more from their blog.
Introducing new innovations to power AI-driven operations
Real-Time Intelligence is already transforming how organizations operate, but we are not stopping there. To truly power AI-driven operations, organizations need more than fast pipelines and dashboards. They need a complete understanding of operations, not just when events happen, but also where they occur and how they are related. They need the ability to rapidly identify the signals that matter in a sea of data. And they need the data to power AI agents that can autonomously act in time to make a difference.
That is why today we are thrilled to announce major innovations in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence: Maps, Graph, and Anomaly Detector. Together, these capabilities expand Real-Time Intelligence into a comprehensive platform for transforming operations, making intelligence more contextual, more actionable, and more autonomous.
Map: Adding geospatial reasoning to intelligence
Real-Time Intelligence has always started with when events happen. But in the real world, operations often depend on where they happen. Location is often a missing but critical dimension.
With the new Map item, geospatial visualization and reasoning is as simple and intuitive as any other Fabric capability. Using intuitive no-code experiences, business users can create, customize, and consume map-centric applications bound to live data in Eventhouse, Lakehouse, and OneLake. Multiple layers from different sources can be overlaid on a single map, making it possible to see assets, people, and events as they move, all without GIS expertise or developer skills.
Maps in Fabric transforms massive volumes of location-based data into interactive, always-up-to-date map visuals designed for quick exploration. The impact is immediate: organizations can monitor the flow of goods across global supply chains, watch sensor data streaming from infrastructure assets, or visualize customer activity across retail networks in real time. Because the data flows continuously, Maps delivers a live geospatial view of operations, enabling sharper awareness and smarter, location-aware decisions.
And this is just the beginning. By bringing the where alongside the when, Maps sets the stage for the next wave of AI-driven operations, where intelligent systems can not only track what is happening, but anticipate what is coming, optimize logistics and routing, and identify the best course of action.
Graph: Understanding relationships and dependencies
Operations are not linear, they are networks. Suppliers link to distributors, machines connect to production lines, customers interact across journeys, and assets tie into broader systems. Success depends not just on what happens, but on how entities connect and influence one another.
The new Graph capability in Fabric brings relational and causal reasoning directly into operations. With simple low- and no-code tools and natural language querying, users can build graph models in minutes, exploring connections and multi-hop dependencies across customers, assets, suppliers, and systems.
Graph in Fabric is built upon the proven architecture principles of LinkedIn’s graph technology, one of the largest and most heavily used production graphs in the world. It delivers a scale-out architecture, built-in graph algorithms, and intuitive visual exploration that serve everyone from business users to data scientists.
The value is immediate, organizations can detect weak links in supply chains, uncover cascading risks across systems, or see how disruption in one plant impacts production downstream. Customer journeys can be mapped more clearly, showing how one interaction shapes the next. Graph provides the relational context that turns isolated signals into connected intelligence.
By weaving the how into the when and where, Graph opens the door to AI-driven operations that not only map relationships, but simulate outcomes, anticipate cascading effects, and trigger interventions before risks spread or opportunities are lost.
Anomaly Detector: Uncovering the signals that matter
Hidden in that sea of signals are the early warnings of risks and the fleeting opportunities that could change outcomes. The challenge has always been the same: how do you spot them in time and separate true anomalies from ordinary patterns?
The new Anomaly Detector item is designed to do exactly that. Continuously scanning both real-time and historical data, it surfaces unusual patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. By learning from historical behavior, the detector automatically builds a baseline of what “normal” looks like. That context is critical. Without it, anomalies in the moment cannot be distinguished from ordinary fluctuations. Historical training ensures the system recognizes seasonality, cyclical trends, and operational rhythms, making real-time detection sharper and more reliable.
Using no-code experiences, business users can detect anomalies the moment they emerge, without needing data science expertise. The value is immediate, a sudden drop in production can be flagged before it impacts supply. A spike in customer churn can be caught before it spreads. Shifts in demand, anomalies in sensor readings, or irregularities in financial transactions can all be identified and acted on in the moment.
Anomaly Detector helps detect many critical signals so that potential opportunities to act are not missed. By bringing Analytical AI directly into the heart of operational data, it enables organizations to move from simply recording what happened to proactively shaping what happens next.
Additional innovations and enhancements
Alongside the major announcements, we are also delighted to announce a wave of smaller but powerful enhancements in Real-Time Intelligence, the kinds of improvements that customers have been asking for and that make adoption easier, faster, and simpler.
These updates span the entire Real-Time Intelligence experience. New Event Schema Sets and Microsoft streaming data source integrations like Azure Monitor diagnostic logs simplify data onboarding. Expanded private link support for Eventstream and Eventhouse strengthens security and compliance for sensitive workloads. New connectors (including MongoDB for Eventstream) and expanded Activator triggers (such as Spark Jobs and Fabric User Data Functions) make it easier to integrate intelligence into existing workflows. And with Copilot-powered dashboard exploration, teams can analyze signals more intuitively than ever.
Each of these enhancements might seem incremental on its own. But together, they reflect our commitment to listening to customers and continually removing barriers. They make Real-Time Intelligence not just a platform for breakthrough innovation, but also one that evolves through steady, practical improvements that matter day to day.
You can explore the full list of upcoming features in the product roadmap.
The unified and complete solution for AI-powered operations
With these innovations, Real-Time Intelligence is no longer just about speed. It is about a complete, 360-degree understanding of your operations. Organizations now have time, space, and relationships woven into a single operational fabric. They can move seamlessly from insight to action, having humans and AI agents working side-by-side to run operations smarter, faster, and more autonomously.
The introduction of Map, Graph, and Anomaly Detector builds on a strong foundation that already includes Eventstream, Eventhouse, Digital Twin Builder, Activator, Real-Time Dashboard, and Copilot. Together, they form a unified, highly integrated platform, one that turns fragmented, complex, and costly real-time systems into a single, accessible solution. And because it is built with no-code and low-code tools, this transformation does not require armies of specialists or prohibitive upfront investment. It is intelligence that is usable by everyone.
The implications are profound, the gap between leaders and laggards is widening. Leaders are already building real-time, AI-powered operations as a competitive moat, capturing the signals that matter, understanding them in context, and acting before the moment is lost. The shift is not theoretical, it’s underway.
The only question is: who will lead it?
With Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, you can transform your operations today and secure your place in the era of agentic AI.
The future of operations is real-time and AI-powered, and the future is here.
Explore additional resources on Real-Time Intelligence
Engage
- Submit ideas and vote: Fabric Ideas
- Ask questions on the: Real-Time Intelligence Forum
Stay updated
- Microsoft Fabric Blog
- Microsoft Fabric YouTube Channel
- Follow on LinkedIn: Follow Real-Time on LinkedIn
- Check the Microsoft Fabric Release Plan
Learn more
- Real-Time Intelligence Documentation
- Graph Documentation
- Complete the learning path: Implement a Real-Time Intelligence solution
- Get certified: Real-Time Learning Path
- Read the free eBook: The Democratic Data Revolution: Real-Time Insights for All
- Find customer success stories: Fabric Customer Success
- Play the Kusto Detective Agency Fabric edition: Kusto Detective Agency | Solve Data Investigation Challenges
- Complete the tutorial: Real-Time Intelligence Tutorial
- Try an extensive tutorial: FabCon RTI Tutorial
- Sign up for one-day training: Real-Time Intelligence in a Day
