Microsoft updates Fabric for agentic transformation

Microsoft believes the era of enterprise agentic transformation is here, underscored by a slew of Microsoft Fabric announcements at the European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference in Barcelona today.

“We’re going to talk a lot about the notion of how you prepare your data estate to really provide the context for AI agents to help you transform the organization,” Amir Netz, CTO of Azure Data, told CIO.com last week.

At Microsoft Build 2026 in June, Microsoft unveiled Rayfin, a new open-source SDK and CLI that supports AI-assisted development. Now Microsoft has introduced Fabric Apps, which leverages Rayfin to bring applications development directly to governed data in Microsoft Fabric. The idea is to help organizations build and scale AI-powered applications with new capabilities for data connectivity, transactional workloads, backend logic, storage, and policy-controlled access.

“It’s not just the data itself,” Netz said. “You can build the entire app, including the web pages, the business processes, the functions, and you can build it end-to-end in Fabric. You don’t need to deploy containers. It’s fully hosted, fully managed, fully governed, only Fabric.”

Strength in numbers

Microsoft is also introducing new agentic data engineering features in Fabric that stem from its acquisition of Osmos in January. The AI-based data engineering firm’s tech uses agentic AI to turn raw data into analytics, and AI-ready assets in OneLake, the data lake at the core of Microsoft Fabric. With these new features, engineers can now define an outcome and set boundaries, and an agent can autonomously execute the work, validate the results, and refine the approach.

“They have this secret sauce of how to get really high accuracy from agents in very complex data engineering projects that you can’t just achieve by telling Claude to do it for you,” Netz said. “No matter how well your prompt is constructed, it’s not going to be good enough. The accuracy level we’re getting from this Osmos technology is significantly higher than any other commercially available agentic system from the best frontier labs.”

Meanwhile, Observability in Fabric is a new feature to support proactive operations rather than reactive troubleshooting. The Monitor Hub provides a unified view across jobs, capacities, workspaces, and workloads. Operations agents and Activator help teams investigate issues, identify root causes with AI, and automate responses.

“Observability is required for teams to both debug their projects and manage projects after they’re released in production,” Netz said. “It’s spanning both agents and code because you have agents that are going to call code, and you need to have the entire journey of the logic, and the execution from end-to-end.”

Shot in the arm for admin

For administrators, Database Hub in Fabric, now in public preview, provides a central control plane for managing SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and SQL databases in Fabric. This helps administrators monitor and govern their entire database estate.

“Fabric is becoming the center point for everything data at Microsoft and everything that’s context based on data,” Netz said. “Fabric has always been about unifying all the data services, unifying all the data, and unifying users in one place. Now it unifies the entire inventory of databases, both in Azure and on-premises, in one place. You can find all your databases, monitor them, manage them, administrate them, and do it all with the help of an agent.”

To help companies share data with agents outside organizational boundaries, Microsoft has also introduced IQ Share in Microsoft Fabric, which allows organizations to securely share data and the business context around it while maintaining governance.

“The agents work on the same copy across the two organizations and the context comes with it so agents on both sides can really understand the meaning of the data,” Netz said.