Foster a more data-driven culture with generative AI in Microsoft Fabric

From the invention of steam power to putting the world’s knowledge at our fingertips with the advent of smartphones, the right tools have always sparked transformation. And now we are seeing the potential of the next great shift: the new era of AI. It is one of the most exciting shifts of our generation, and we, along with other leaders are seeing this impact take shape across individuals, entire teams, and every industry. Everything from enterprise chat for better knowledge mining, to content generation and speech analytics, to data analysis to uncover more insights and make data more accessible.

Take PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for example, a leader in the professional services sector and a long-time technology innovator. PwC is applying generative AI to acquire, transform, and analyze data faster to better support its employees and provide better audit experiences for clients.

“We’re implementing Microsoft infrastructure to help future-proof NGA design, increasing the potential future adaptability of our assurance services and processes. Generative AI capabilities within the Azure OpenAI Service open up possibilities for us to enable natural language interfaces for enterprise data.” 

Winnie Cheng, Director of AI in Products and Technology at PwC

Connect your data with Fabric

PwC is not alone. Increasingly, organizations are turning to AI to transform their data cultures for better business outcomes. Traditionally, building this culture requires a few key ingredients:

1. Organizing your data into a logical data mesh to make it easier for users to discover, reuse, and enhance the best data available.

2. Creating a seamless analytics engine that can meet the demands of the business to uncover insights in real-time.

3. Infusing those insights into the applications your people use every day so they can make data-driven decisions.  

These steps are still vital, but now you can employ generative AI to accelerate the path to a data-rich culture by enhancing the productivity of your data teams and making analytics tools more accessible to everyone. In my webinar, Infusing AI into your Data Culture: A Guide for Data Leaders I walk through exactly how Microsoft can help you accomplish each step along this journey.

First, we’ll explore the blockers preventing users from discovering, accessing, and using data to innovate and make better decisions. I will also show you the promise of Microsoft Fabric’s single, SaaS, multi-cloud data lake, OneLake, designed to connect to any data across the organization and serve everyone who needs access to data in an organized, intuitive data hub. Your data teams can use the OneLake data hub to manage your data, endorse high-quality data to encourage use, and manage access. Users can easily find, explore, and use the data items that they have access to—from inside data tools like Fabric or even applications like Teams and Excel. For more on OneLake, read our e-book, Lakehouse Analytics with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks. 

With your data accessible to those who need it, you also need to equip them with powerful analytics tools that can help them scale to the needs of the business. That’s where Microsoft Fabric further shines. With Fabric, data teams can use a single product with a unified experience and architecture that provides all the capabilities required for analysts to extract insights from data and present them to the business user. Each role in the analytics process has the tools they need, so data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, business users, and data stewards feel right at home. By delivering the experience as a SaaS platform, everything is automatically integrated and optimized, and users can sign up within seconds and unlock significant business value within minutes.  

With your data in a single place and your data teams empowered to uncover insights faster than ever, the next step is to get insights into the hands of everyone in your organization. I’ll show you how Power BI can infuse reports and insights into your apps like Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and even third-party apps like Salesforce and SAP.  

And now, as we enter a future built on AI, I’ll walk you through three key ways generative AI can help foster a more data-rich culture: 

1. Take advantage of out-of-the-box experiences like Copilot in Fabric which helps you accelerate the productivity of your data teams.  

2. Employ powerful AI models right from Fabric to draw deeper insights from your data. 

3. Create custom AI experiences, grounded on your data, with native integration between Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Studio.

Source: microsoft.com