Microsoft Build 2023 Highlights: unified analytics, Copilot and new AI capabilities
Microsoft Build 2023 took place from 23–25 May 2023, and MDW attended the conference to share the most relevant announcements. Microsoft Build is an annual event for software engineers and developers where Microsoft unveils updates to its platforms, tools and services. This overview summarises the key innovations with a focus on accessible language, clear sub‑headings and shorter sentences.
Microsoft Fabric – a unified analytics platform
As per official documentation, Microsoft Fabric is « an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place. »
It offers a single unified product, integrating Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI.
Microsoft Fabric features seven core components:
- Azure Data Factory (Preview) combines the straightforwardness of Power Query with the robustness of Azure Data Factory. It offers over 200 native connectors on-premises and in the cloud for data sources.
- Azure Data Factory (Preview) combines the straightforwardness of Power Query with the robustness of Azure Data Factory. It offers over 200 native connectors on-premises and in the cloud for data sources.
- Synapse Data Engineering (preview): this feature offers a great Spark platform with quality authoring experiences, allowing for large-scale data transformation and democratization of data.
- Synapse Data Science (preview): Provides a complete workflow for data scientists to build sophisticated AI models, collaborate easily, and train, deploy, and manage machine learning models.
- Synapse Data Warehousing (preview): This feature offers industry-leading SQL performance and scalability. It separates compute from storage, allowing for independent scaling, and natively stores data in the open Delta Lake format.
- Synapse Real-Time Analytics (preview): Allows developers to handle data streaming from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, telemetry, logs, and more and analyze large volumes of semi-structured data with high performance and low latency.
- Power BI in Fabric: Offers leading visualization and AI-driven analytics that enable business analysts and users to extract insights from data. The Power BI experience is deeply integrated into Microsoft 365, providing relevant insights where business users already work.
- Data Activator (coming soon): Provides real-time detection and monitoring of data and can trigger notifications and actions when it finds specified patterns in data—all in a no-code experience.
OneLake – a single data lake
Microsoft Fabric introduces OneLake, a built-in, multi-cloud data lake automatically available to all Fabric users. It is an intuitive data hub, organized and indexed for easy discovery, sharing, governance, and compliance, benefiting developers, business analysts, and end users.
Much like OneDrive, all Fabric workloads are directly connected to OneLake.
Each tenant has access to a single instance of OneLake, which offers a unified view of the filesystem across different users, geographical locations, and even multiple cloud environments. For ease of management, the data within OneLake is segmented into manageable units called containers.
OneLake aims to eliminate the chaos of data silos created by different developers working with their own isolated storage accounts. It provides a unified storage system where data discovery and sharing are simplified, and policy and security settings are centrally enforced.
OneLake offers us a feature called “Shortcuts” that makes it easy to share data between users and programs without making extra copies of the data. It can work with data storage in ADLSg2, Amazon S3, and, soon, Google Storage, making it a multi-cloud system.
Data analytics for the era of AI
OneLake can handle structured and unstructured data, giving users much flexibility.
Fabric provides a simplified data system using OneLake as the central place for storing data and Delta and Parquet as the standard format. This means users don’t need to keep different copies of data for different uses. Instead, one copy of the data in OneLake can be used for all tasks. All compute engines can instantly work with the data stored in OneLake: There is no need to load in DWH or refresh in Power BI.
If needed, we can synchronize the OneLake with our local computer as we could do with OneDrive. And thus, explore the files and even add new files directly from here. Changes will be instantly reflected to the Fabric.
Image source: Data analytics for the era of AI
Governance and Security across Fabric is also addressed, with Fabric offering a unified SaaS platform integrating Power BI, Synapse, and Data Factory. This enables data teams to collaborate on a single workspace, on the same copy of data, with centralized administration, governance, and compliance tools. These capabilities include data lineage and impact analysis, data protection with sensitivity labels, data endorsement, admin monitoring, and more.
Image source: Data analytics for the era of AI
Copilot in Fabric and Power BI – AI for everyone
With Copilot inside Microsoft Fabric, users will benefit from substantial AI assistance allowing them to describe their problems and get immediate answer.
Thus, Copilot will help them turn words into dataflows and data pipelines, create machine learning models or generate SQL queries.
Users will also have the possibility to create custom Natural language tools, in the form of plug-ins, that combine Azure Open AI and the organization’s data.
1. Create the Plug-in based on data
2. Define the process/steps
3. Get the answer with detailed information and source:
Moreover, they will also be able to ask questions through Teams, for example, and get answers based on data in Fabric:
Data Activator – automating real‑time actions
Data Activator
Another interesting feature that Microsoft Fabric brings us is the “Data activator”. This new no-code tool will empower the users to drive actions automatically from the data.
Image source: Data analytics for the era of AI
Data Activator offers the following:
1. Data Connection: The Data Activator can link to various data sources within Microsoft Fabric, such as Power BI datasets, Event streams, etc. It consistently scans for patterns that warrant action upon establishing a connection with your data.
2. Recognizing Actionable Scenarios: Data Activator offers a centralized platform to determine actionable trends in your data. It could be a KPI crossing a certain threshold or a more complex analysis involving temporal changes, like a downward trending value.
3. Prompting Actions: When Data Activator identifies an actionable pattern, it initiates an action. This could be sending an email or alert via Teams or triggering an automatic process, such as a Power Automate flow or an activity within your organization’s enterprise apps.
Microsoft Power BI
As part of the new Fabric platform, the latest developments for Power BI provide users with a range of new features and functionalities. These enhancements transform data analysis and visualization, boosting productivity and efficiency.
Build and edit reports using Copilot
Among these exciting innovations, Copilot, integrated with Power BI, brings large language models to help users create and manipulate data visuals and insights effectively. It will assist users in the following tasks:
- Report creation
- Generation and modification of DAX calculations
- Creation of narrative summaries
- Asking questions about their data
All of that in conversational language.
Let’s look at some examples.
You can describe the report you need, by providing detailed information
…and it will be built in seconds!
You will be able to adjust it using a user-friendly interface:
Want to make your report look like an existing one? No problem! Just give Copilot an example of a report, and it will transform it in seconds:
For example, by applying same theme.
You can as well add additional graphs, or data summarizations:
Power BI Desktop users will also have the possibility to be assisted by Copilot. Using natural language, they can ask questions and get answers in form of a DAX query. Indeed, a new view called “DAX query view” (future update) will allow them to create and test measures, see data preview, as well as get help from the AI model to write DAX code.
In addition, Power BI’s new storage format based on Delta Lake and Parquet aims to reduce data duplication and management. This feature, referred to as Direct Lake mode, allows for impressive performance with no data movement necessary, thereby reshaping big data consumption.
Git integration
Collaboration is also enhanced with Git integration for Power BI datasets and reports. Developers can now easily track changes, revert to previous versions, and merge updates from team members into a singular reliable source.
Image source: Empower every BI professional to do more with Microsoft Fabric
Bing + ChatGPT integration and plug‑ins
ChatGPT will no longer be limited to its knowledge before 2021, which it was trained on. The integration with Bing will provide more timely and accurate responses. It also allows answers to be grounded by search and web data, including citations, so you can easily navigate to the sources.
Microsoft has introduced a new extensibility model for Microsoft 365 Copilot that enables developers to integrate their own apps and services via plug‑ins. These plug‑ins allow AI systems to interact with external APIs for real‑time data retrieval, enrichment and computation. Developers can choose among three plug‑in types: ChatGPT plug‑ins, Teams message extensions and Microsoft Power Platform connectors, making it easy to reuse existing resources and skills.
In addition, Microsoft emphasised interoperability across platforms. Developers can build plug‑ins once and deploy them across ChatGPT, Bing, Dynamics 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Windows Copilot. Bing is also expanding its plug‑in ecosystem; beyond earlier integrations with OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha, it now includes partners such as Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Redfin, TripAdvisor and Zillow, delivering in‑chat recommendations to users.
Here are a few examples:
- Expedia: offers conversational trip planning for seamless travel booking.
- Instacart: helps plan dinner menus, create shopping lists and place grocery orders.
- Kayak: acts as a virtual travel assistant by presenting popular features in a conversational format.
More companies are enabling plug‑ins for Bing Chat, which will soon be available in the chat interface and the Edge sidebar on both desktop and mobile. This broadened ecosystem promises a more personalised and intuitive user experience.
Azure AI services and developer tools
Microsoft has announced several updates to Azure AI designed to boost productivity, improve content safety and expand semantic search capabilities.
- Azure AI Studio lets developers build, train, customise, evaluate and deploy AI models. You can ground models on structured or unstructured data and tailor them to specific use cases.
- Prompt Flow provides a streamlined environment for crafting, testing and optimising prompts. It makes it easy to create workflows that connect to multiple models and data sources.
- Azure AI Content Safety is an AI‑powered service that detects and classifies harmful content in multiple languages, using image recognition and real‑time detection to ensure regulatory compliance.
- Azure Cognitive Search introduces vector search in preview. This feature lets you store, index and search by concept rather than keywords, paving the way for personalised responses, product recommendations and fraud detection.
- Cognitive Service for Language gains enhancements that allow custom summarisation and better conversational understanding. Integration with Power Virtual Agents simplifies the creation of intelligent chatbots.
Windows Copilot – AI built into Windows 11
Copilot integration to Windows 11 will provide centralized AI assistance and will help people in their daily tasks.
It will assist you with things such as:
• Personalize and navigate your PC
• Work with documents, such as explain, rewrite, summarize
• Complete tasks, such as switch to dark mode
• Simplify workflows with plug-ins, like launching a song on Spotify
Conclusion – gearing up for integrated AI
Although these features are still very new, it’s important to understand the substantial impact they can have on your business and digital transformation. By adopting Microsoft Fabric, you can streamline development cycles and simplify product lifecycles thanks to a unified interface for all data services. This centralised platform shortens your time to market and reduces complexity.
The Synapse Data Warehouse solution allows you to separate storage and compute costs, making it easier for large organisations to allocate budgets. Autoscaling ensures resources expand as needed, but careful cost management remains essential. Synapse Real‑Time Analytics brings fully integrated streaming capabilities that were previously lacking, empowering data engineers to deliver real‑time insights for high‑value business scenarios.
Data Activator introduces a powerful no‑code way to trigger events based on live data changes, eliminating the need to build custom change‑data‑capture systems. OneLake’s ability to virtualise and consolidate multiple data lakes across Azure, AWS and soon Google Cloud simplifies governance and opens the Microsoft ecosystem to heterogeneous architectures.
The arrival of Copilot across Data Flow, Power BI and Windows represents a major leap in productivity for both developers and end users. Organisations should begin preparing for change management now, as these tools are expected to deliver a strong return on investment and will reshape daily workflows.
If you’re looking to modernise your solutions and leverage these AI‑powered advances, partnering with experienced experts is crucial. At MDW, we believe every successful project starts with careful planning and execution. Our specialists can assess your unique business needs, recommend the right solutions and ensure they are implemented according to best practices. By following the highest standards in Microsoft data, AI and analytics, we help you maintain control over costs, security, delivery and operations.
