Introducing AI Skills in Microsoft Fabric: Now in Public Preview
Additional authors: Alex van Grootel
At Build, we announced AI skills – a new capability in Fabric that allows you to build your own generative AI experiences. We believe that generative AI enables a fundamentally new way for you to interact with your data, dramatically increasing the amount of data-driven decision-making in organizations across the world. After months of testing, we’re excited to put this tool in the hands of all Fabric customers.
One generative AI product you may already be familiar with is Copilot in Fabric, which assists data professionals to be more productive and business users to explore data more easily. Copilots help boost productivity by finding answers and generating code for you. Copilot in Fabric is intended to be an assistant, and as such, there is an expectation that you will work with the AI to verify and approve its outputs. Copilots are incredibly powerful for anyone performing data tasks on Fabric, and we will continue to make these more integrated, sophisticated, and reliable. But in working with many customers, we’ve also observed a need for a different experience. An experience that requires even less input from the end user. This is where AI skills come in.
What is an AI Skill?
AI skills allow you to create your own conversational Q&A systems on Fabric using generative AI. By putting in effort up front, you can give your colleagues the experience of simply asking a question and getting a reliable, data-driven answer in return. In the AI Skill, you can provide instructions and examples to guide the AI to the correct answer for any given question in your organization. This allows you to ensure that the AI understands your organization and your data context before you share this capability more broadly with others in your organization or team.
See a demo video of the AI skill below:
Why do I need an AI Skill?
Many organizations have centralized or embedded analyst groups, who spend significant portions of their day answering data questions that are not necessarily overly complex or nuanced but still require knowledge about query languages (like SQL) as well as the data context. As a result, data-driven insights remain locked behind a few groups or individuals, who often struggle to keep up with requests for answers. Responding to constant incoming data questions takes valuable time away from more sophisticated analysis or proactive strategic planning.
Generative AI offers a promising solution to this challenge. Generative AI has proven to be adept at writing queries. The part that is still missing in many generative AI applications is the nuance and context that comes with any real-world data system. AI skills allow you to capture this context and nuance in a way that allows the AI to understand your data systems fully. You cannot expect a newly hired analyst to immediately and reliably tackle all incoming data questions on day one. You expect them to gradually learn about your metrics, definitions, and data quirks. In the same way, you cannot expect an AI to be perfectly accurate in answering questions unless you give it the full set of background information that it needs to answer your questions.
Key features
AI skills are packed with key features that are designed to streamline your workflow and enhance your data security:
- Focus the AI: Select the data you want the AI to access, to focus its scope on specific tables in your databases.
- Configure through instructions: Provide instructions in English to guide the AI to follow rules or definitions.
- Configure through examples: Give example question and query pairs that the AI can use to answer similar questions.
- Secure and safe: Data governance is honored by ensuring that the Fabric account of whoever asks the question is used to execute any queries written. And before any queries are executed, we ensure that it won’t accidentally delete or alter the underlying data in any way.
Over time, we will continue to evolve this experience to extend its capabilities and make it easier for you to provide the right information to the AI.
The AI Skill experience is now available for all customers when using Fabric F64 or larger capacity. Please note that your tenant admin must enable this preview experience and the Fabric AI setting before you can try it out.
We encourage you to try out this new public preview generative AI experience and let us know what you think. We can’t wait to see how this experience empowers users in your organization!
Get started today
Learn more about the AI skill in Fabric.
