The essential guide to Microsoft Fabric for data leaders
The future of AI is here. From easy-to-use copilot experiences that come out-of-the-box to custom generative AI solutions built in the new Azure AI Studio, every organization is exploring how they can take advantage of AI. And most are confident they’ll be successful—with 87% of organizations believing AI will give them a competitive edge1.
This excitement means data leaders are accelerating AI projects across their organizations. But as you prepare for a future built on AI, you also need clean data to fuel AI. Fostering game-changing AI innovation requires a well-orchestrated data estate that can support everything from niche AI projects to scalable AI solutions that span the company. This is a challenging prospect for most organizations whose data environments have grown organically over time with specialized and fragmented solutions. A complex data estate leads to data sprawl and duplication, infrastructure inefficiencies, limited interoperability, and even data exposure risks—not an ideal place to start your AI innovation.
For businesses looking to streamline and advance their data estate, the burden is often on you, the data leader, to evaluate potentially thousands of data and AI offerings, find the right set of services, figure out how to integrate them, and do it all in such a way that is scalable and flexible enough to evolve over time. Most data leaders would rather focus on the outcomes of their tools rather than spend all their time integrating specialized solutions and maintaining their data estate. That’s where Microsoft Fabric comes into play.
Microsoft Fabric is redesigning how you work with data by bringing all your data and analytics tools into a single experience. Fabric moves away from individualized services to a unified stack, from multiple databases to a unified data lake, from generative AI bolted on to generative AI simply built in. With Fabric, your teams can use shortcuts and mirroring to connect data from any cloud or database into Fabric’s data lake, OneLake, often without duplicating or moving it. Once in OneLake, everyone can work from a single copy across multiple engines and data formats. Your data professionals have all the specialized tools they need in one unified software as a service (SaaS) experience to reduce the cost and effort of integration. The intelligence you uncover can then securely flow to the Microsoft 365 applications your teams use every day to improve decision making and drive impact. And AI-powered features like Copilot help everyone be more productive—whether it’s creating dataflows and pipelines, writing SQL statements, or building reports.
How to get started with Microsoft Fabric
With so many capabilities in a single platform, it’s likely hard to fully understand exactly how Microsoft Fabric can impact your organization. That’s why we’ve created an e-book called Microsoft Fabric: The Essential Guide for Decision Makers which you can download for free.
This guide helps you discover everything Fabric has to offer and illustrates what you can accomplish with Fabric serving as your data foundation. And this e-book is only the first in a three-part series. You can also check out:
- Volume 2: Modern Analytics: A Foundation to Sustained AI Success to learn how to unlock value from your data with powerful AI tools.
- Volume 3: Manage and Govern Your Data with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview to learn how Microsoft Fabric enables and simplifies data stewardship.
Watch the Fabric overview video to see the analytics solution in action:
Explore additional resources to learn about Microsoft Fabric
If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:
- Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
- Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website.
- Registering to attend the Microsoft Fabric Conference—use code MSCUST to save $100.
- Reading the latest announcements and watching the Fabric sessions from Microsoft Ignite.
- Discovering more in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
- Joining the Fabric community.
- Reaching out to your Microsoft account team or contacting a sales specialist to demo Fabric and explore pricing options.
