Microsoft Fabric Copilot: How to use AI for data analysis

Microsoft continues to enhance its productivity tools by integrating features based on artificial intelligence. With the arrival of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, the company's all-in-one analytics platform, users can now leverage AI capabilities to improve the data analysis and visualization process. This integration marks another step toward adopting advanced tools aimed at optimizing efficiency and accuracy in data management operations, catering to both industry professionals and less experienced users.

In this article, we will take a closer look at what Copilot and Fabric are, the features characterizing their integration, and the contexts in which they can assist data experts within your organization.

Microsoft Fabric Copilot: What is it?

In today’s corporate world, companies heavily rely on their data to make insight-driven decisions. However, simply owning raw information is not enough. Businesses need intelligent and accessible analytics tools to unlock the true value of their data.

And it doesn’t help that organizations face a relentless wave of data daily—data that can be as much a disaster as a hidden treasure trove of potential insights. Yet, unlocking this potential isn’t simple: data is typically stored in isolated silos and comes in a variety of formats from numerous sources. Additionally, synchronization issues stemming from these silos lead to significant integration costs, and poor data quality can undermine the effectiveness of AI models.

To tackle this challenge, Microsoft offers the combined potential of two of its best products: Copilot and Microsoft Fabric. The design of Microsoft Fabric resembles an “information metropolis” with distinct districts, each dedicated to a specific data need. Copilot serves as the AI guide to this metropolis.

Together, Copilot and Microsoft Fabric form a unified solution that simplifies data-driven processes and paves the way to efficiency and transformative success. With Microsoft Fabric, companies are embracing new ways to transform data, generate meaningful insights, and move toward a successful, data-driven future, leaving outdated practices behind.

But how do they work together, and what are the features and use cases of this integration? Let’s explore these in the next sections.

What Are Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Fabric?

Before diving deeper into their integration, let’s take a moment to catch up on what Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Fabric are— the two protagonists of this article.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered digital assistant designed to simplify daily tasks, enhance productivity, and spark creativity. Its primary objectives include code generation, writing assistance, and collaboration. Seamlessly integrated with popular Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, Copilot offers contextual suggestions and helps users better understand information.

Powered by the cutting-edge GPT-4 language model, Microsoft Copilot boasts features like code autocomplete, documentation search, and collaborative writing. Microsoft continues to enhance Copilot with new capabilities, demonstrating its commitment to Gen AI as a cornerstone for the future of its business-focused products.

The AI assistant caters to a broad audience, including developers, content creators, and professionals seeking AI-powered assistance for their tasks.

The main ways to leverage Microsoft Copilot are:

• Adopt Copilot: Microsoft offers various Copilot assistants to boost productivity and creativity. Integrated into numerous Microsoft products and platforms, Copilot transforms the digital workspace into a more interactive and efficient environment.
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• Extend Copilot: Developers can incorporate external data, streamlining user operations and reducing the need to switch contexts. This not only improves productivity but also enhances collaboration by integrating external data into commonly used Microsoft products.
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• Build Your Own Copilot: Beyond adoption and extension, users can create a customized Copilot for a unique conversational experience using tools like Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Search, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and other Microsoft Cloud technologies. A personalized Copilot can integrate enterprise data, access real-time external data via APIs, and seamlessly blend into business applications.

Microsoft Copilot is available in several packages, each tailored to specific use cases, such as:

• Copilot (Free): The free version offers access to generative AI features for PC management (in Windows), online search (in Edge), and general conversations with the web chatbot.
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• Copilot Pro: Designed for individual users who want to maximize the benefits of generative AI, priced at around $20 per user per month. It provides access to Copilot in tools like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
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• Copilot for Microsoft 365: This version targets individuals and teams working with Microsoft apps. It includes access to Copilot Studio, enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance, along with advanced capabilities.

Additionally, there are specialized Copilot versions integrated into specific Microsoft tools, such as Microsoft Dynamics for sales and customer service teams, and security-focused solutions in Microsoft Purview.

Microsoft has also introduced and updated a series of “agents” tailored to specific industries like finance, customer service, and marketing, equipped with training and features specific to those domains.

Despite initial skepticism among Windows 11 users, Copilot has significantly evolved since its preview phase and is now considered one of the leading productivity tools in the AI era.

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is an integrated analytics and data engineering platform developed by Microsoft, designed to unify and simplify large-scale data management and analysis. Built on Microsoft’s cloud and data analytics suite, Fabric combines tools for data management, transformation, analysis, and visualization into a single ecosystem.

Leveraging Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure, it seamlessly integrates with Power BI, Azure Synapse, and other Microsoft tools, enabling businesses to work with data from diverse sources more efficiently.

Fabric offers a range of services tailored to various aspects of data management. Its features are organized into different "experiences" (or modules) that manage data throughout its lifecycle, from collection to advanced analytics:

• Data Factory: An enhanced version of Azure Data Factory for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and data integration. It allows data collection and transformation from multiple sources, such as databases, files, SaaS applications, and cloud services, with simplified visual workflows.
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• Synapse Data Engineering: Enables advanced data engineering operations, such as data preparation and cleaning, often using Spark. Data engineers can create complex pipelines to transform raw data into analysis-ready formats.
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• Synapse Data Science: Provides a data science environment for building and training machine learning models using languages like Python and R. It integrates with Jupyter Notebooks and other platforms to streamline modeling and experimentation.
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• Synapse Data Warehousing: Offers serverless data warehousing capabilities, enabling the storage and analysis of large structured and semi-structured datasets. Its serverless nature ensures horizontal scalability and rapid data analysis without infrastructure management.
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• Synapse Real-Time Analytics: Designed for real-time analytics use cases, such as monitoring streaming data or IoT telemetry. It processes real-time data to generate immediate insights.
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• Power BI: Natively integrates with Fabric for data visualization. Users can create interactive reports and dashboards to easily share analysis results, enhancing collaboration and communication within organizations.
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• Data Lake (OneLake): Serves as a centralized repository for all data. OneLake simplifies data management by providing a single, centralized source compatible with various formats and analytical tools. It supports Delta Lake storage and synchronization with Azure Data Lake and other data lakes.

Fabric’s architecture is based on a data lakehouse vision, combining the strengths of data warehouses (structured and optimized for analysis) and data lakes (flexible storage for heterogeneous data). Key components include:

• OneLake as the central data lakehouse.
• Delta Tables, an optimized format for analytical operations, based on Delta Lake, which simplifies structured and semi-structured data management.
• Integrated modules that operate on data within OneLake, minimizing the need for data transfer or duplication.

With Fabric, Microsoft aims to create a comprehensive platform that makes data analytics more accessible to both technical and non-technical users. It allows businesses to respond quickly to market changes and challenges by integrating various data silos and expertise into a unified, intuitive, and scalable platform.

Microsoft Fabric Copilot: key features

As previously mentioned, companies heavily rely on their data to make insight-driven decisions. However, simply possessing data is not enough. Organizations need intelligent and accessible analytics tools to unlock their true value.

This is where Microsoft Fabric comes into play, offering a powerful, unified analytics platform. With its integrated capabilities powered by Copilot, it helps analysts extract actionable insights from their data.

Together, Copilot and Microsoft Fabric form a solution that simplifies data-driven processes, enabling businesses to embrace new ways to transform their data, generate meaningful insights, and move toward the future of information management and processing, leaving outdated practices behind.

The main strengths of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric include AI-based assistance, machine learning, personalization, and natural language understanding. Let’s explore each of them in detail.

AI-based assistance

Copilot in Fabric helps streamline project management methods. As a data professional, you can use this AI tool to improve project visibility and enhance team collaboration.

When you request a project update, Copilot navigates through the organization’s project management software, extracts relevant data, and analyzes it to generate detailed reports. These reports provide an instant view of task statuses, such as completed and ongoing activities, responsibilities, and expected timelines.

Machine Learning and personalization

Copilot's machine learning capabilities in Fabric allow it to adapt to the unique needs and work styles of each user or organization.

For instance, it can be trained to recognize specific terminology or project structures used within a company, enabling it to provide more precise and relevant assistance.

Additionally, Copilot’s machine learning algorithms can handle unstructured data, such as user queries in natural language. This means it can understand and respond to a wide range of requests, regardless of how they are phrased. With time and proper training, the system becomes better at grasping the nuances of human language, improving its ability to understand and respond to user inquiries.

Copilot also learns from feedback. You can provide input on its responses or actions, which is then used to optimize its algorithms and enhance its future performance. This feedback loop ensures that Copilot continues to learn and improve, becoming increasingly helpful over time.

Understanding natural language

Copilot’s ability to understand natural language is a core aspect of its AI capabilities. This technology allows the system to interpret human language in a meaningful and contextually relevant way.

For example, you can ask it to “Show the latest sales data for top-selling products,” and Copilot will understand that it needs to access sales data, identify top-selling products based on that data, and retrieve the latest figures for these products.

Additionally, this natural language comprehension enables Copilot in Fabric to handle complex and multi-part requests.

For instance, you could ask it to “Schedule a meeting with the marketing team next week to discuss the Q3 campaign and send an agenda before the meeting.” The system would recognize that this involves several steps:

• Scheduling a meeting
• Identifying relevant team members
• Defining a meeting topic
• Sending an agenda

Microsoft Fabric Copilot: benefits and use cases

Microsoft has integrated Copilot at every level of Fabric since its launch, enabling data analysis professionals and other users to gain valuable insights from their data. After exploring the general features and functionalities of the integration between the two, this section examines the role Copilot can play in each Fabric experience.

Copilot for Data Science and Data Engineering

With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, users can leverage AI-powered assistants to perform data analysis and visualization tasks. Copilot provides natural language responses and code snippets that simplify and enhance programming efficiency.

Microsoft’s AI digital assistant answers questions about Lakehouse tables, Power BI datasets, or Pandas/Spark data frames. Additionally, it generates data-specific code based on user needs.

Microsoft Fabric Copilot supports code generation for:

• Spark Notebooks
• Chart creation
• Data filtering
• Applying transformations
• Machine learning models

Copilot for Power BI and Data Analytics

Copilot for Power BI and data analytics enables the use of generative AI to create well-designed reports, dashboards, and articulate analytical narratives. This allows organizations to access accurate and up-to-date data, generating actionable insights to maximize their potential.

According to the Forbes Advisor 2024 survey, AI is seen as a resource for improving decision-making (44%), reducing response times (53%), and preventing errors (48%). With Copilot's functionalities for Microsoft Fabric Power BI and data analytics, business users can:

• Generate custom reports based on textual prompts or a one-page summary on a specific topic.
• Create narrative visualizations providing textual summaries of data or entire reports.
• Generate synonyms to enhance Q&A capabilities for better question-and-answer interactions.

Copilot for Data Factory

Data Factory is a core component of Microsoft Fabric that enables users to create, orchestrate, and manage data pipelines effectively. With Copilot's integration within the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, Data Factory has become even more powerful, allowing users to harness Copilot's automation capabilities for building and managing data engineering solutions.

This automation reduces the need for manual coding, enabling data professionals to prioritize data analysis and interpretation. Copilot boosts the overall efficiency of data pipelines and ensures seamless data flow from source to destination.

Conclusions

AI-based solutions are here to stay, and Microsoft’s investment in its Copilot, coupled with its integration across all its enterprise-focused solutions and products, is clear evidence of how the future is advancing in that direction at an incredible pace.

Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is yet another winning combination of Microsoft's AI digital assistant with what has already been recognized since its launch as one of the most useful and interesting tools for data analysis and engineering in recent years.

Fabric’s functionalities, combined with Copilot's generative AI capabilities, offer a highly beneficial solution that can truly simplify and enhance the daily work of data professionals. Given the relative youth of both, the features offered by this integration may only be a glimpse of what the future holds.

FAQ on Copilot in Microsoft Fabric

What is Microsoft Fabric Copilot?

‍Microsoft Fabric Copilot is a digital assistant powered by artificial intelligence, designed to integrate with Microsoft Fabric, a unified platform for data management and analytics. This tool helps users transform raw data into actionable insights, improving efficiency and simplifying complex processes.

How does Microsoft Fabric Copilot work?

‍Fabric Copilot leverages advanced AI models to assist users in code generation, data preparation, and analysis. By using natural language commands, it allows users to explore, clean, and visualize data, making it accessible even to those without advanced technical expertise.

What are the benefits of using Fabric Copilot?

‍Fabric Copilot helps accelerate decision-making by providing insights from data more quickly and intuitively. It also supports the management of complex workflows, increasing productivity, and reducing manual errors.

How does Fabric Copilot differ from other data analysis tools?

‍Fabric Copilot stands out due to its ability to understand and execute natural language instructions, making data analysis accessible to a wider audience. Additionally, it integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, ensuring a smooth and cohesive user experience.

Which companies can benefit from Fabric Copilot?

‍Fabric Copilot is particularly beneficial for companies dealing with large volumes of data and seeking a more efficient and scalable approach to data management and analysis. It is ideal for teams that require collaborative tools to optimize internal processes and strategic decision-making.

Is technical expertise required to use Fabric Copilot?

‍No, one of the key features of Fabric Copilot is its ease of use. Thanks to its AI-driven capabilities and natural language understanding, even users without specific technical training can make full use of its features.