The eighth edition of the AI Index report is out. The 2025 Index is the most comprehensive to date as AI’s influence across society, the economy, and global governance continues to intensify
In the report it covers
The Microsoft AI Skills Fest is starting from 8 April 2025 to 28 May 2025 to enhance your AI skills and unlock the future. From experiential content to hackathons, there is a lot of opportunity to learn at all levels.
Register today: https://msft.it/6042qSzcE
There were lots of announcements during the FabCon 2025 conference. Here are a few to catch up on. The main Microsoft blog post can be read here: Fueling tomorrow’s AI with new agentic capabilities and security innovations in Fabric
Fabric Data Factory
Fabric Data Factory enables data ingestion through applying data transformations, and orchestrating different data-related activities for modern data management architectures. There were many new features added such as
Further reading Fabric Data Factory: What’s New and Latest Roadmap
There were also many product improvements and features for Mirroring in Fabric
Mirroring in Fabric – What’s new
Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse
A really exciting announcement to help migrate from Azure Synapse Analytics was unveiled. This Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse will soon be in preview! The Migration experience is built natively into Fabric and enables the seamless transition from Azure Synapse Analytics (Data Warehouse) to Microsoft Fabric.
Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse (Preview)
Copilot for Data Engineering and Data Science
There is a new version of Copilot for Data Engineering and Data Science, a next-generation AI-powered assistant designed to elevate data analysis and coding experience.
Further reading Enhancing AI productivity in Fabric notebooks with Copilot updates
Copilot F2 and above SKUs
This is great news for customers on F2 and above SKUs that they will have access to Copilot, Fabric data agents, and more.
Azure AI Foundry
Organizations can use Azure AI Foundry to connect customized, conversational agents, created in Microsoft Fabric.
Microsoft Purview
There are several new innovations in Microsoft Purview for protected, AI-ready data
1. Enhancing Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) support for lakehouse in Fabric to help prevent sensitive data loss by restricting access
2. Expanding DLP policy support for additional Fabric items such as KQL databases and Mirrored databases to show users notification through policy tips when they are working with sensitive data
3. Microsoft Purview for Copilot in Fabric
4. Data observability, now in preview, within Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog
These are a few of the announcements that were of particular interest to me but there were a lot of announcements showcasing the sheer volume of change and growth of Microsoft Fabric.
I had a great time at MVP Summit this week. I learn a lot of new things. It was great to be able to network, provide customer feedback and talk about the ever evolving Data & AI landscape. With the speed of change seemingly increasing all the time it is good to stop and have a clear week reflecting on things that work and don't work and how to improve our practices when working with data and AI.
I think the biggest take away is that the Data & AI community is always approachable and helpful. There is always someone with deep knowledge of an area who can help and the community just gives up so much time to help others learn and grow from helping children learn coding skills, to creating and running conferences, speaking, mentoring and so much more.
I have been privileged to be a Data Platform MVP for the last 7 years and would like to thank Microsoft for providing an amazing opportunity to attend the conference.
There have been some mind blowing changes released today which will aid the future of work. Microsoft have introduced the first-of-their-kind reasoning agents for work.
Researcher
Researcher helps you tackle complex, multi-step research at
work. This will help delivering insights with greater quality and accuracy.
Analyst
Analyst thinks like a skilled data scientist looking at raw data to produce insights in minutes.
Introducing Researcher and Analyst in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Read more about Researcher and Analyst
Deep reasoning and agent flows
Deep reasoning and agent flows in Microsoft Copilot Studio
is in preview and offers a comprehensive platform to create, manage, and deploy
agents matched to business needs.
Deep reasoning
Deep reasoning, agents can perform complex tasks and make more accurate decisions.
Agent flows
Agent flows bring AI workflows into Copilot Studio that enable agents to follow a predefined sequence of actions, ensuring consistent results for structured tasks.
It is exciting to be able to attend MVP summit 2025 virtually. It was not possible to attend in person, this year, but so glad that it is possible to attend virtually.
Copilot shares its thoughts on the summit.
The MVP Summit is an exclusive event hosted by Microsoft for its Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). These are individuals recognized for their exceptional contributions to the tech community, such as sharing knowledge, providing feedback, and supporting others in using Microsoft technologies. The summit offers MVPs the chance to connect with Microsoft engineers, attend technical sessions, and collaborate on shaping the future of Microsoft products and services. It's a unique opportunity for networking, learning, and sharing expertise.
The AI Decision Brief Insights from Microsoft provides insights for AI leaders on navigating the Generative AI platform shift. AI has a potential to transform business but the rapid growth of the technology causes challenges in keeping up to date and knowing how to adopt it. As well and the infrastructure required 2 areas that are covered in the report which I this need investing is is AI skills and the importance of AI governance strategies. It is worth reading the guide to understand about the complexities and seeing how real world examples use AI.
The paper shares the five stages of generative AI readiness as
The five drives for business value mentioned are
The top 3 elements to create best practice to get started are to
It is a useful document to read AI Decision Brief Insights from Microsoft
