Driving your AI strategy with Microsoft Fabric and Azure solutions

 

Summary

  • AI agents and other leading-edge tools are already starting to completely disrupt the ways industries operate.
  • To take advantage of the newest AI capabilities, businesses need to get their data cleaned, streamlined and readily available in the cloud.
  • All-in-one ecosystems like Microsoft Fabric can integrate data from disparate parts of a business with the tools you need to produce deeper, faster insights.

 

AI is taking center stage in companies across many sectors, and for good reason. New capabilities, like AI agents, are spreading. AI agents can understand context, come up with ideas on their own, execute autonomously and even spot their own mistakes. They’re enabling surges in productivity, agility and innovation. And it’s not just agents: More and more AI-based services and products are entering the market. Most of the software you use may already have AI capabilities built in. If not, it will soon.

As PwC’s 2025 AI Business Predictions show, you should develop and deploy an AI strategy quickly. If not, your existing competitive advantages won’t matter. AI can make them obsolete. If you do make wise decisions and move quickly with AI investments today, you can build an “edge” so significant, your competitors are unlikely to catch up.

One key foundation of AI is an effective, strategic and centralized approach to data and cloud — which is exactly what Microsoft Fabric and other Azure solutions offer. Microsoft Fabric is an off-the-shelf, all-in-one solution to organizing and modernizing data. It can house, access, distribute and analyze your cloud-based data. It also provides access to top-notch AI tools. This fusion of capabilities can advance data modernization and make AI more accessible, cost-effective, secure and reliable. It can give you a leg up in the race to make your organization AI powered.

Driving your AI strategy with Microsoft Fabric and Azure solutions

Share

 

Summary

  • AI agents and other leading-edge tools are already starting to completely disrupt the ways industries operate.
  • To take advantage of the newest AI capabilities, businesses need to get their data cleaned, streamlined and readily available in the cloud.
  • All-in-one ecosystems like Microsoft Fabric can integrate data from disparate parts of a business with the tools you need to produce deeper, faster insights.

 

6 minute read

January 28, 2025

AI is taking center stage in companies across many sectors, and for good reason. New capabilities, like AI agents, are spreading. AI agents can understand context, come up with ideas on their own, execute autonomously and even spot their own mistakes. They’re enabling surges in productivity, agility and innovation. And it’s not just agents: More and more AI-based services and products are entering the market. Most of the software you use may already have AI capabilities built in. If not, it will soon.

As PwC’s 2025 AI Business Predictions show, you should develop and deploy an AI strategy quickly. If not, your existing competitive advantages won’t matter. AI can make them obsolete. If you do make wise decisions and move quickly with AI investments today, you can build an “edge” so significant, your competitors are unlikely to catch up.

One key foundation of AI is an effective, strategic and centralized approach to data and cloud — which is exactly what Microsoft Fabric and other Azure solutions offer. Microsoft Fabric is an off-the-shelf, all-in-one solution to organizing and modernizing data. It can house, access, distribute and analyze your cloud-based data. It also provides access to top-notch AI tools. This fusion of capabilities can advance data modernization and make AI more accessible, cost-effective, secure and reliable. It can give you a leg up in the race to make your organization AI powered.

Microsoft Azure clients worry less about costs and more about integrating all their data

Chart showing Microsoft Azure clients worry less about costs and more about integrating all their data
*Note: Asked only to executives in technology roles who use cloud service providers; showing 3 choices out of 12 options.
Q: As you think about your only/first choice cloud service provider, what have been your biggest challenges experienced to date? (Ranked top-1)
Source: PwC's 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey
Base: Microsoft Azure 284, Other providers 434

How Microsoft Fabric connects you to LLMs

Choosing a cloud service provider (CSP) for AI tools can feel a bit like choosing which walled garden you’re going to live in. Will your CSP have the solutions your company may need tomorrow? Next year? Is locking into a set data architecture more of a gamble than an investment?

Microsoft Fabric provides access to different large language models (LLMs) — Microsoft’s own, as well as third-party models — and makes your data more available for analysis, regardless of which tools you’re using. In our survey, 83% of those who selected Microsoft Azure as their primary CSP told us that they’re multicloud, also using other CSPs as needed for specialized purposes. Think of it less like a walled garden and more like an open world, where you get the benefits and savings of a simplified and streamlined ecosystem without giving up your freedom of choice.

Use case

PwC is currently working with one telecom client who found generating narrative insights from monthly financial metrics a complicated, time-consuming and highly repetitive task. Computing growth and margin for a company that deals with constantly changing usage required teams of people to identify a correct interpretation of the data. By leveraging Azure services and importing the data into Power BI, we were able to help the client build a visual trends narrative where 80% of the work is done by their LLM, before being reviewed and tweaked by human agents. And as the LLM learns, less and less human intervention is required — it’s decreased month over month, increasing the client’s savings and freeing up valuable time for their people.

How Microsoft Fabric speeds innovation

Microsoft Fabric also creates value by reducing the time and resources required for your team to create and deploy innovative new tools. Easy, low- and no-code solutions are built into each level of the Fabric. This allows non-technologists to create in minutes the same outputs that previously could have taken your development team days or even weeks to create manually.

Imagine non-technical team members using Copilot Studio in Microsoft Power Platform to create custom applications, analyze data and automate workflows. Take management reporting as an example. A business user could query the tool and ask a simple question, such as why are sales down in this region?  Whereas it used to take a lot of time and effort to manually gather and analyze data, now that can be done in a fraction of the time: Copilot finds and analyzes the data and provides an answer. The user can then further ask questions and refine the analysis.

How much more work could your client teams get done now that they’re not waiting on reports? What innovations could your dev team focus on with this valuable new time?

Companies that use Azure realize more value from their data architecture

Chart showing Companies that use Azure realize more value from their data architecture
Q: Which of the following best describes how cloud technology is, or is not, delivering measurable value in your company in relation to performance and capabilities? ‘Adopt new architecture.’ (Response to ‘Adopt new architecture’.)
Source: PwC's 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey
Base: Microsoft Azure 284, Other providers 434; Top Performers 124, Other companies 906

Get more from your data fabric with Microsoft

Many companies work with a data ecosystem. Consolidating that data for different products at a business level allows larger teams to possess a single source of truth — a data marketplace where the organization can benefit from an open-architecture data repository. Getting more from that ecosystem through a unified catalog or more detailed data quality reports, allows companies to evolve their relationships with their CSPs as capabilities increase and costs fall.

We mentioned how Microsoft Copilot’s functionality is built into its various apps and products. A vertically integrated data fabric takes that a step further: Copilot is natively connected in Azure and works across applications.

For example, say you want to bring in a third-party AI model for a particular analysis. Microsoft’s vertical integration allows you to layer that model on top of Fabric, generate your insights, and then import the results into Power BI for easy visualization. And with everyone accessing the same marketplace of data, business units selling different products or services can use that same data to extract insights that are discretely meaningful to their purposes — and link customer needs to other teams to find innovative solutions.

Bar chart showing Microsoft customers are more likely to be evolving their cloud relationships than other CSP customers
Microsoft customers are more likely to be evolving their cloud relationships than other CSP customers
*Note: Asked only to executives in technology roles; response to 'Other,' 'None of the above' and 'Unsure' not shown.
Q: In what ways, if any, are you changing your relationships with third-party cloud service providers? (Select all that apply.)
Source: PwC's 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey
Base: Microsoft Azure 284, Other providers 434

Anil Nagaraj

Principal, PwC US

Email

Diego Jarne

Principal, PwC US

Email

Contact us

Anil Nagaraj

Anil Nagaraj

Principal, PwC US

Nimma Bakshi

Nimma Bakshi

Managing Director, Global DXC Alliance Leader, PwC US

Follow us