5 ways Microsoft Fabric can help get your data ready for GenAI

1. Make it easier to access data — without needing to move or copy it

If your organization is like most, you have data sets with different standards in different systems. That can make this information hard for GenAI to access. But Microsoft Fabric is designed to be a universal data platform. Its data lake can embed shortcuts that point to other storage locations, even in non-Microsoft products. You don’t need to incur the costs, time delays and risks of moving or copying your data. Instead, you can quickly and securely access your existing cloud data, wherever it may be.

There are a few steps to take before moving to Microsoft Fabric. If your data isn’t on the cloud, you should move it there. You should consider what your current data lake is delivering to make sure the transition is seamless. You may need to adapt your tech architecture. And you should assess your data — its current quality and what quality you’ll need — and set some rules about how it will be indexed, governed, and distributed and how future data will be sourced, among other issues.

2. Standardize data — then keep it synced and discoverable across apps and locations

Once the shortcuts in Fabric’s data lake have connected your data, GenAI (or another solution) can access it. Of course, all this data in different systems may be in different formats, but Fabric can help standardize, troubleshoot and organize it so your various GenAI apps are working from compatible data sets. Then, as different GenAI applications derive insights from Fabric and enter new data into the system, Fabric can keep it synced. Fabric’s shortcuts can also help different applications discover the data they need. The result can be your teams running GenAI (and other applications) on consistent, high-quality data.

3. Enhance trust in your data — while streamlining data management

For internal and external stakeholders to trust your data and the outputs it produces, you should be able to protect, troubleshoot, govern and report on it – all challenges when it’s scattered across multiple systems. But as Fabric connects your data into a single layer, you can deploy enterprise-wide cybersecurity, controls, privacy policies and compliance. Fabric also comes with governance, reporting, analytics and other tools designed to strengthen data quality, security, transparency and compliance. It offers, for example, easy integration with Purview, Microsoft’s unified data governance solution.

4. Drive GenAI integration — and business understanding

Fabric was designed with GenAI in mind. GenAI tools from Microsoft and OpenAI — such as Copilot and Azure OpenAI — can tap into Fabric’s data pipelines for end-to-end integration. Your GenAI models can get the latest, cleanest data, automatically with governance and oversight built in as context to your prompts and plugins. Fabric also offers Power BI visuals, so you can show rather than merely tell business leads the value that your GenAI initiatives are delivering.

5. Better manage data-related costs

Since Fabric is designed to be a universal data platform, it offers ways to help manage data-related costs. You can choose different vendors to meet your storage and compute needs, use different vendors and services for different data sets, and easily move among them. You could, for instance, use one computational service to analyze complex, time-sensitive data, and another, lower cost service for simpler, less critical data. This increase in flexibility can bring significant savings — especially for GenAI, which requires storage and compute resources.

Getting started with PwC and Microsoft Fabric

Through our deep experience in data modernization and GenAI, and our long-standing alliance with Microsoft, we understand what Fabric can do. It can advance enterprise data initiatives, help GenAI accelerate those initiatives and help deliver the relevant, reliable data that GenAI (and other digital technologies) need. As with many technology upgrades, there are steps involved when moving to Fabric. It’s usually most effective to start by assessing your current data ecosystem and considering your plans — not just for data, but also for GenAI.

We’re still in the early days for GenAI, but it’s already driving massive operational efficiencies and changing how knowledge work gets done. GenAI is poised to transform old business models, create new ones and disrupt whole markets and industries. But GenAI can’t do this on its own. Among the other components of a rapid, trustworthy deployment, GenAI can benefit from a platform like Microsoft Fabric to help provide it with the data that it needs.