Fabric upgrades, autonomous agents, and more. Here’s what came out of Microsoft’s biggest developer event of the year.
Getting value from AI isn’t just a technology problem. It’s a data problem. AI needs to understand the context of your business before it can meaningfully act on your behalf. At Build 2026, Microsoft laid out its answer: a connected platform spanning Microsoft Fabric, Copilot, and the newly launched Microsoft IQ, designed to ground AI in the data and knowledge that matters most to your organization.
Intelligence Layer
Microsoft IQ: A unified context layer for AI agents
One of the standout announcements from Build was Microsoft IQ, now generally available across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, and Copilot Studio. It’s the intelligence foundation that gives AI agents real organizational context, going beyond model capability to provide a true understanding of how your business actually works.
Microsoft IQ brings together Work IQ (workplace activity across M365), Fabric IQ (a shared semantic layer over structured business data), Foundry IQ (enterprise knowledge retrieval), and the newly launched Web IQ (live web grounding for agents).
Agentic AI
Microsoft Scout: Always-on AI that works like a colleague
Microsoft introduced Scout, a new category of AI agent they’re calling an “Autopilot.” Unlike Copilot, which responds when asked, Scout is always on, built on OpenClaw and Work IQ, and operates with its own identity and acts proactively on your behalf across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint.
Scout handles meeting prep, flags scheduling conflicts, monitors your inbox, and keeps work moving without waiting to be prompted. It’s currently available to Microsoft Frontier program customers with a GitHub Copilot license.
Microsoft Fabric
Fabric goes agent-ready, with a serious performance upgrade
Fabric IQ is now central to how agents interact with business data. It provides a shared semantic foundation over structured data in OneLake, with Power BI semantic models serving as the trusted business intelligence layer for agents. Ontologies in Fabric IQ, expected to go generally available in the coming months, extend this further by defining business entities, relationships, rules, and live signals from Fabric Real-Time Intelligence.
On the performance front, Fabric Data Warehouse now supports GPU-accelerated query execution through CoddSpeed, which just won the Best Industry Paper at SIGMOD 2026. Fabric is the first fully managed SaaS data warehouse to ship it.
Microsoft also announced that Fabric Data Factory now supports agent-ready integration with deeper diagnostics, dbt support, AI-assisted Airflow authoring, and a smoother migration path from Azure Data Factory.
Copilot in Power BI can now modify semantic models directly, with built-in AI recommendations to improve performance and make models more AI-ready. Teams can iterate faster without leaving the tools they already use.
Developer Platform
Project Rayfin & the path from prototype to production
One of the more practical announcements for developers and data engineers was Project Rayfin (now in preview). It auto-generates application database backends and deploys them to Microsoft Fabric with a single command, directly addressing the gap between AI-assisted prototyping and getting something production-ready.
Read more: Azure Blog: Fabric & Databases at Build
OUR TAKE
What this means for Inviso clients
For the clients we work with at Inviso, these announcements aren’t just news. They’re the next step in a journey we’re already on together. As a Microsoft Fabric Featured Partner, we help organizations build the data foundations that make AI meaningful.
We work with organizations across industries to deliver data platforms and AI solutions on Microsoft Fabric, from foundational data engineering and semantic modeling to agentic AI development and Power BI modernization. Fabric IQ maturing, Copilot gaining the ability to act on semantic models, and agents reasoning over live business data all move the needle on what is possible when the right data foundation is in place. If you are thinking about what these updates mean for your organization, we would love to connect.
