Microsoft Tuesday introduced Fabric Apps, a way to build AI-powered applications directly on governed data in Microsoft Fabric, along with agent-driven data engineering tools, CIO.com reported. The Register reported that Power BI Pro and Premium Per User licensees will get the app building features at no additional cost.

What Happened

The announcements came at the European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference in Barcelona. Fabric Apps are built with Rayfin, an open-source SDK and command-line tool for AI-assisted development that Microsoft introduced at its Build conference in June. Apps can include web pages, business processes, functions and back-end logic, and Microsoft hosts, manages and governs them, so developers do not deploy containers. According to The Register, Rayfin apps can take inputs, write data back and keep shared state, and the SDK works with coding agents such as GitHub Copilot and Claude Code.

For Power BI Pro and Premium Per User licensees, Microsoft is including Fabric Apps and Fabric Database, with up to 1GB of storage per app plus authentication and security features, The Register said. A preview is expected in the coming weeks.

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Microsoft also detailed agentic data engineering features built on technology from Osmos, an AI data engineering company it acquired in January. Engineers define the outcome they want and set boundaries, and agents carry out the work, check results and adjust their approach, turning raw data into analytics-ready assets in OneLake. Amir Netz, CTO of Azure Data, claimed the Osmos technology is significantly more accurate than any other commercially available agentic system from frontier labs.

Other additions include:

  • Monitor Hub, a single view across jobs, capacities, workspaces and workloads, where operations agents and Activator help investigate problems and automate responses.
  • Database Hub, now in public preview, a central control plane for SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB and Fabric SQL databases.
  • IQ Share, for sharing governed data and business context with organizations outside the company. Netz said agents on both sides work from the same copy of the data.

Why It Matters

The Power BI licensing move targets Microsoft's largest analytics audience. The Register put Fabric at 40,000 customers, compared with 425,000 organizations and more than 35 million monthly business users on Power BI. Letting those users build apps on Fabric without buying new capacity could turn a large share of that base into Fabric users.

The pitch is that report builders can become app builders. Arun Ulag, a Microsoft executive vice president, said, according to The Register, that "the distinctions between a dashboard and an app are disappearing." A Power BI user who today publishes a dashboard could instead ship a small application that collects input and writes it back to governed data, work that usually needs a separate development and hosting stack.

The agentic data engineering tools aim at a different group: data engineers who build and maintain pipelines. Microsoft's accuracy claim for Osmos has not been independently tested, and results will depend on how well agents handle messy, real-world source data.

Competitive Context

Fabric competes with Databricks and Snowflake to be the main platform for enterprise data and AI workloads. Both rivals have been adding app-building and agent features of their own, and Microsoft's advantage is distribution through Power BI and the rest of its software estate. Microsoft is also piloting a bidirectional integration with Salesforce Data Cloud 360, The Register reported, so CRM data can be used across Microsoft's analytics and AI tools without being copied.

What to Watch

The Fabric Apps preview for Power BI users is expected within weeks. Key details to follow are how the 1GB per-app limit holds up for real workloads, when Database Hub and the Osmos-based features reach general availability, and whether Microsoft sets usage caps that push heavier app builders onto paid Fabric capacity.