Data Engineering, Finance and AI
Power BI's new agent skills write PBIR files, reload Desktop and iterate from screenshots. Where the delegation line sits for a finance BI team.
Fabric Activator can now emit governed, persistent Business Events. Why that matters for finance teams whose KPI monitoring is still a staring contest.
Agent Skills and Fabric Apps turn models, reports and apps into agent-written code. What ties out, who reviews the diff, and who owns the app.
Microsoft's Gen1 vs Gen2 benchmarks show refreshes dropping from hours to minutes. The real story is what runtime now does to your CU consumption.
Graph in Fabric is GA: GQL queries straight on OneLake, no extra ETL. Where path-shaped finance questions outgrow the star schema and what to pilot first.
A hallucinating LLM step fails silently. Mapping RAG grounding, output schemas, and stepwise validation onto the controls finance already runs.
Power BI's April 2026 update improves Copilot, visuals and Direct Lake modeling. The real efficiency gains in finance still come from orchestrating upstream.
Fabric data agents now accept service principal authentication in preview. What that fixes for production deployments, and the access question it raises.
Fabric Warehouse history is now configurable from 1 to 120 days per warehouse. Five lessons on treating that retention window as a finance-grade control.
Fabric's Eventhouse now runs anomaly detection, data agents, SQL and notebooks on live event data. Why that consolidation matters for finance teams.
Microsoft says Power BI won't be made to work with third-party semantic models. The technical reasons are a lesson in where finance metric logic belongs.
Fabric Data Warehouse now runs ai_extract, ai_classify and custom prompts straight from T-SQL. Four lessons before you point them at finance text.
Fabric Data Factory's Airflow jobs now run dbt and copy jobs, with new APIs to trigger DAG runs. Five predictions on where orchestration goes from here.
Fabric Dataflows Gen2 can now write formatted Excel workbooks (titles, tables, charts) straight to a lakehouse. What that means for month-end reporting.
Fabric's new capacity overage swaps throttling for a 3x metered bill. Where the limits, monitoring and spend ownership should sit before you opt in.
