| Microsoft Adds IQ Layer To Fabric |
| Written by Kay Ewbank | |||
| Thursday, 04 December 2025 | |||
|
Microsoft is adding a "semantic intelligence layer" to Fabric to add that elevates Fabric from a unified data platform to a unified intelligence platform. The announcement says the extra layer will turn an organization's data into "a live, structured, connected model of how your business operates". Microsoft Fabric is a data analytics product that combines elements of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Factory into one unified software as a service (SaaS) platform, with data organized in a data repository called OneLake.
The documentation for Fabric IQ describes it as a workload for unifying data sitting across OneLake (including lakehouses, eventhouses, and semantic models) and organizing it according to the language of your business. The data is then exposed to analytics, AI agents, and applications with consistent semantic meaning and context. The benefit of IQ will be consistency across tools, so a single definition of a concept such as customer or material is used across different tools such as Power BI, notebooks, and agents. This would reduce duplication and semantic drift, while constraints improve data quality. IQ uses graph links to carry out cross domain reasoning, so a user could traverse relationships (like Order > Shipment > Temperature Sensor > Cold Chain Breach) to explain outcomes. A key feature of Fabric IQ is ontology. This is a shared model of business entities, relationships, rules, and objectives that can be used for modeling. It defines entity types, properties on entity types, and relationship types, binds these features to data sources, and automatically builds a navigable graph. The ontology item integrates with Graph in Microsoft Fabric to provide a visual graph and query experience based on your business concepts. Users can also build Power BI models based on the ontology, or use it to provide information to power domain aware agents. There's also a Fabric data agent that can be used to build your own conversational Q&A systems using generative AI; and a preview of Graph in Microsoft Fabric that offers native graph storage and compute for nodes, edges, and traversals over connected data. An Operations agent can be used to create an AI agent to monitor real-time data and recommend business actions; there's also a Power BI semantic model that's optimized for reporting and interactive analysis with measures, scorecard hierarchies, and relationships for visuals and DAX. Microsoft's vision for Fabric IQ is that it will be combined with Foundry IQ in Microsoft Foundry and Work IQ in Microsoft 365, forming a shared intelligence layer. Microsoft Foundry lets developers build advanced, orchestrated agents that plan, reason, and act across systems. Instead of starting from a blank slate, these AI agents inherit live business context from Fabric IQ through Foundry IQ, including the ontology and the real-time state of the business. Multiple agents and teams can collaborate on a shared foundation, exchanging context instead of pulling in conflicting directions, and developers can build agents that already know what concepts like a plane, route, and passenger means. The more cynical among you will notice that this all means you need to have a really good understanding of your business when defining your ontology, and we've all seen how well that stage of every business software process goes, haven't we. More InformationRelated ArticlesMicrosoft Announces Fabric Data Analytics To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
Comments
or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info |
