The 2025 AI Index Report

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 

• in-depth analyses of the evolving landscape of AI hardware 
• novel estimates of inference costs 
• new analyses of AI publication and patenting trends. 
• fresh data on corporate adoption of responsible AI practices
• expanded coverage of AI’s growing role in science and medicine. 

Microsoft AI Skills Fest

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

Microsoft Community Fabric Conference 2025 announcements

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 

• General availability for CI/CD capabilities in Data Factory 
• SPN auth available for pipeline CRUD APIs to secure API apps without needing to use their user token when using the REST API.
• Lakehouse connector to read delta tables, being able to use the information from the deletion vectors to exclude deleted records.
• Support for column mapping, and automated auto-creation of tables with new schemas.

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.

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Azure AI Foundry

Organizations can use Azure AI Foundry to connect customized, conversational agents, created in hashtagMicrosoft Fabric.

Microsoft Purview

There are several new innovations in hashtagMicrosoft 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.