Digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence – Revolutionizing digital twin creation and management
Microsoft is excited to announce the preview of the digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, a new capability designed to help organizations bridge their physical and digital worlds to create an AI ready foundation for their operations. It simplifies the creation and management of data-driven digital twins at scale, enabling users to understand system-wide connections and create unparalleled insights and operational efficiency.
Overview of digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric
Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical and/or logical entities— whether they are physical assets like machinery, logical entities like customers, or dynamic processes like manufacturing and logistics. Digital twins provide customers with unprecedented visibility, including relevant context of their enterprise-wide entities and processes. Yet, building and managing digital twins at scale has traditionally been complex, involving fragmented data sources, inconsistent data quality, and challenges in governance and security.
Digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence democratizes and scales digital twin scenarios by making them more accessible and actionable for operators and decision makers. It equips users with low code/no code experiences to build and model digital twins. Digital twin builder capabilities are the following:
- Modeling: Build shared vocabulary and structure to create comprehensive digital replicas of real-world entities, processes, and environments.
- Mapping: Harmonize diverse data sources into an ontology layer that connects digital twins with their real-world counterparts, ensuring accurate representation.
- Relationships: Enrich digital twins with semantic relationships and dependencies, reflecting real-world context.
- Extensions: Enables advanced analytics, visualization, and AI/ML use cases for deep insights and predictive capabilities.
Digital twin builder is a native capability of Microsoft Fabric, leveraging its scalability and unified security model. It also leverages out-of-the-box Microsoft Fabric data connectors to ingest data from a wide variety of data sources including data flowing from real-world signals. The digital twin data is stored in the OneLake, making it accessible and consumable by other Microsoft Fabric experiences within your tenant. Use Real-Time Dashboards or Power BI to unlock insights of the digital twin data and better understand your physical operations.
Check out the sizzle video of digital twin builder in the Microsoft Fabric Youtube channel.
Customer and Partner Voices
During the Private Preview phase, we worked with early adopters who have already begun reaping the benefits of digital twin builder. We are excited to continue working with both customers and partners during the preview phase. Here is what some of our customers are saying:
“CSX aims to leverage digital twin builder to develop a dynamic operations ontology and to leverage that ontology to enhance the accuracy of fuel burn predictions for different train routes. Since both locomotives and train lines exhibit rapidly evolving relationships at the entity instance level, a traditional database approach struggles to capture these dynamic interactions efficiently. By implementing an ontology inside digital twin builder, CSX unified their critical metadata—such as locomotive specifications (cargo type, weight, etc.) and train line attributes (starting point, endpoints, stations, etc.)—into a cohesive framework. This structured knowledge base then is planned to be used for natural language querying (with and without reason) and for input into machine learning model, improving operational decision-making and fuel efficiency insights.” -Chandrashis Bhowmick, Senior Information Architect, CSX Corporation.
“At SPIE, we see a unified ontology as the critical foundation for becoming a truly data-driven organization. With digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric and PULSE Core, we connect and contextualize data from across our portfolio. This structured approach allows us to generate actionable real-time insights, streamline operations, and deliver measurable value—faster. It’s a transformative step-change that empowers us to move beyond siloed systems toward a smart, scalable, and client-focused service model that delivers sustainable value.” Maikel Nabuurs, Director of Digital Asset- & Data management, SPIE Nederland B.V.
During the private preview, we have also collaborated with technology partners to enable high value, industry-specific end-to-end solutions. Some of our launch partners include NVIDIA, Avanade, Sight Machine and Bravent.
Microsoft is collaborating with NVIDIA to enable customers to unlock the full potential of their data estate. By integrating digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric with NVIDIA Omniverse platform, customers can connect 3D data with other data types. This includes batch and operational data coming from IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology) systems. It enhances their operational digital twins with 3D and robotics data, providing improved operational capabilities and empowering their teams to achieve more. Learn more about the reference workflow powered by the Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) in the Azure Arc Jumpstart.
“The integration of digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric with OpenUSD and NVIDIA Omniverse technologies enables the industrial ecosystem to create AI-enabled digital twins that can be used to better monitor and optimize operations,” said Brian Harrison, senior director of product management, NVIDIA Omniverse. “This integration paves the way to numerous opportunities in operational monitoring, simulation, and physical AI development.”
“Avanade is helping manufacturers create digital twins of factories, warehouses, and chains using the new Digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric,” said Juergen Mayrbaeurl, Global Architecture Advisory Lead— Industry X, Avanade. “It makes it easier to create and manage digital representations of their real-world operations. Using agentic AI, employees on the shop floor are able to talk to their data and keep on top of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like Overall Equipment Effectiveness.”
“By making Sight Machine’s manufacturing data schemas and real-time structured data in digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric, this collaboration will enable manufacturers to gain unprecedented insight into how production intersects with supply chain, sales and other enterprise functions,” said Jon Sobel, CEO and Co-Founder of Sight Machine. “This synergy will help accelerate development of agents that address enterprise-wide business challenges and will ultimately enable better decision making across the organization.” will ultimately enable better decision making across the organization.”
“At Bravent, we are excited about the direction Microsoft is taking with the introduction of digital twin builder. This functionality represents a major step forward in how organizations can model, visualize, and manage complex physical environments in real time. We truly believe that digital twin builder, together with Fabric’s analytical capabilities, serves as a compelling complement to traditional SCADA systems, extending their reach with greater flexibility, connectivity and deeper operational insight.” Mario Lopez, CIO at Bravent
Vision for Digital Twins in the Industrial sector
Microsoft is empowering industrial companies to transform end-to-end operations by providing tools to unify disparate data from OT and IT, develop or leverage AI capabilities, and increase automation and front-line worker efficiency. Digital twin builder in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence helps bridge the gap between OT and IT—enabling real-time insights across design, production, and supply chain systems. By integrating IoT data into a single analytics platform, manufacturers can model physical environments, optimize performance, and accelerate decision-making. Combined with AI agents and a robust partner ecosystem, Microsoft delivers a scalable foundation for digital thread innovation and operational excellence. With a unified data digital thread across the industrial value chain, industrial companies can unlock an array of multi-function use cases:
In energy management: Digital twins assist industrial organizations in improving energy management through a data ontology framework. By modelling assets like turbines, compressors, and substations as digital twins, and training AI agents on these data parameters, industrial organizations can achieve real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and energy flow optimization across complex operations.
In manufacturing: Aggregated data and digital twins of machines and processes support the discovery of insights as well as running what-if scenarios for production engineers to use in root cause analysis, enhancing efficiency, utilization and quality, and waste reduction.
In supply chain: Digital twins can serve as a powerful platform for supply chain data by unifying fragmented data sources into a robust, well-governed data estate that supports real-time visibility, predictive analytics, and AI-driven decision-making. By breaking down silos and enabling smooth data integration, Microsoft Fabric empowers supply chain teams to optimize logistics, enhance supplier performance, and improve demand forecasting.
Getting started
The preview of digital twin builder is now accessible to organizations worldwide in Microsoft Fabric. It’s the perfect opportunity to explore how this innovative capability can drive operational excellence in your industry. Whether you’re in manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, energy & utilities, or retail, digital twin builder is designed to meet your unique needs. We invite you to join the public preview and embark on a journey toward transforming your physical assets into digital insights.
We also encourage you to join Microsoft Build and learn more about digital twin builder in the following session: Building real solutions with Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric.
To find out more about Real-Time Intelligence, read Yitzhak Kesselman’s announcement.
Digital twin builder documentation is available now in Microsoft Learn (Digital twin builder). Digital twin builder is included in the Microsoft Fabric capacity SKU, and new billing meters have been created [1] . For the latest details, go to Microsoft Learn (Fabric Operations).
Begin your 60-day Fabric trial and get started with Microsoft Fabric!
Stay tuned as we continue to refine and expand this capability based on your feedback. Let’s build the future together, one twin at a time.
