Fabric IQ: The Long Road to Smarter Data

• Fabric IQ enhances OneLake data with additional business context to help AI, agents, and other tools perform natural language queries.
• It will mostly help with complex scenarios where connected data and actions are spread across multiple business domains and systems.
• It only works on OneLake visible data, not the full data estate, and has limited features compared to mature competitors.
• Fabric IQ isn’t an automated solution; its value depends on the effort data teams put into data quality, shared definitions, and continual upkeep.

Microsoft Fabric IQ is a new Fabric workload in preview that helps data teams define OneLake data in a consistent way, through a combination of several new and existing features that allow users, AI, and processes to work with the data using natural language. The overall objective of Fabric IQ is important to Microsoft’s AI strategy because AI can’t make dependable business decisions from connectivity and automated discovery alone. It must understand the context and definition of the data it’s querying and know where to find approved data.