Microsoft's cloud-based solution, Fabric, which combines data warehousing, data science, data engineering, and data analytics services, is getting additional data agents.

According to experts, data agents provide a danger of lock-in but may be useful for self-serve analytics. Without the assistance of a business analyst, it aims to assist business users in discovering insights into company data. According to Arun Ulag, corporate vice president of Azure Data at Microsoft, the majority of businesses either lack business analysts or have analysts who are too busy to handle all the demands for their services. According to him, self-service analytics capabilities, such as those Microsoft is integrating into Fabric, are thus essential.

All of Fabric's services, including Synapse and PowerBI, will support the new data agents. Any service may be used to construct them, and they can be set up by giving them access to the data the user wishes to see. According to Ulag, the agents may use more than 200 connections to access data stored in Fabric's OneLake storage or data stored elsewhere.

The agents may perform activities including data retrieval, reasoning, and data visualization when prompted by natural language inquiries. "Can you analyze all my customer survey queries and feedback, prioritize all of the adverse comments, categorize them according to the top five buckets and give me examples?" is one of the questions that Ulag provided the agents with and they should be able to handle it. According to Arnal Dayaratna, research vice president at IDC, that type of natural-language connection is crucial.