What is Fabric IQ?
Fabric IQ is a workload in Microsoft Fabric that adds a unified business semantic layer over OneLake. Organizations work technically on tables and schemas, but their business runs on concepts like customer, shipment or asset. Fabric IQ elevates data to this business language: analytics, applications and AI agents share the same trusted meaning of business entities and can reason in business terms instead of raw data.
Fabric IQ is part of the Microsoft IQ family and works together with Work IQ, Foundry IQ and Web IQ. While those provide context on how employees work, on policies and on web knowledge, Fabric IQ contributes context on business entities and data. The foundation is OneLake as a central, governed data layer that unifies analytical, operational and real-time data across clouds and on-premises, without forcing ETL pipelines or copies.
Core Capabilities
- Ontology (preview): Defines entity types, relationships, properties, rules and actions as a shared business vocabulary. Ontologies can be generated from existing Power BI semantic models and queried in natural language via NL2Ontology.
- Power BI semantic models: A curated analytics layer with measures, hierarchies and dimensions. Concepts and KPIs are defined once and stay consistent across reports, agents and apps.
- Graph: A native graph engine for connected data with nodes, edges and traversals. It is integrated with the ontology and enables multi-hop analysis such as dependencies, impact chains and shortest paths.
- Data and operations agents: Data agents answer domain-specific questions in natural language and are publishable across Microsoft 365, Foundry and Copilot Studio. Operations agents (preview) monitor real-time data, detect anomalies and trigger governed actions.
Common Use Cases
Unified business language: Concepts like Customer, Material or Asset are defined once and interpreted consistently across Power BI, notebooks and agents. This reduces duplicate and inconsistent definitions across teams.
Grounding AI agents: Copilots and agents receive structured business context from the ontology. Answers reflect the enterprise language instead of requiring manual translation by a domain expert for each question.
Root-cause and impact analysis: The graph lets you traverse relationships, for example Order to Shipment to temperature sensor to cold-chain breach, to explain outcomes and trace risks.
Benefits
- Cross-domain reasoning: relationships between concepts make causes and effects traceable across multiple steps.
- Faster onboarding: new dashboards and AI experiences get consistent business meaning because concepts are declared only once.
- Governance and trust: clear semantics and constraints reduce duplication and improve data quality.
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you with the adoption and operation of this service.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Fabric IQ?
Fabric IQ is a workload in Microsoft Fabric that builds a unified business semantic layer over OneLake. Through ontology, Power BI semantic models, graph and data agents, analytics, applications and AI agents share the same meaning of business entities such as customer, shipment or asset. Fabric IQ belongs to the Microsoft IQ family alongside Work IQ, Foundry IQ and Web IQ.
When should I use Fabric IQ?
Use Fabric IQ when AI agents and dashboards need a consistent understanding of business concepts instead of working on raw tables and schemas. Typical scenarios include defining concepts like Customer or Shipment once, grounding copilots in business language, and running multi-hop impact analyses such as Order to Shipment to Sensor to cold-chain breach.
How much does Fabric IQ cost?
There is no separate SKU for Fabric IQ. The workload runs on existing Microsoft Fabric infrastructure and is billed through Fabric Capacity Units (F-SKUs, e.g. from F2 upward). Billing is usage-based per CU per hour (pay-as-you-go), and capacities can be scaled and paused. Current prices are listed on the official Microsoft Fabric pricing page.
Is Fabric IQ available in the EU and generally available (GA)?
Fabric IQ was announced at Microsoft Ignite 2025 and is currently in preview, so not yet generally available. The workload runs on Microsoft Fabric infrastructure, which is offered in multiple regions including the EU. Data remains in OneLake as the central, governed data foundation.
