Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and is launching Copilot, a chatbot that will assist users in making sense of information held in corporate systems.
Furthermore, Microsoft is introducing Fabric, a new brand that will bring together seven data products under one roof.
This is comparable to the release of the Office productivity software suite in 1990, and Microsoft is highlighting cost-saving prospects at a time when customers are tightening their finances.
Fabric holds a single copy of data for numerous applications, such as Synapse Data Science and Power BI. It allows customers to collaborate on AI models and create charts and dashboards.
“You have one meter, so that if your BI system is underused, you can spend it on other parts, or if your data warehouse is underused, you can spend it on your BI meter,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and AI group.
“You’re not having to pay for everything separately. And I think that ultimately yields some pretty significant cost savings to customers.”
According to a Microsoft spokesperson, a single Copilot will be available for the tools in the Microsoft Fabric portfolio. It includes Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Warehousing, Synapse Real-Time Analytics, and a new monitoring tool called Data Activator, in addition to Power BI and Synapse Data Science.
The new technology does not need any technical knowledge to operate. Anyone may launch Power BI and input a report concept into Copilot or select from a list of automatically produced ideas. After seeing a screen full of customizable charts, the user may ask a question regarding the data and receive a response in simple English.
Salesforce unveiled Tableau GPT earlier this month, which will be able to create charts in response to text queries.
Arun Ulagaratchagan, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Azure data, stated that Fabric is “more comprehensive than what has been announced in the market so far,” and that Copilot would be able to construct formula in Power BI using Microsoft’s Data Analysis Expressions language.
Fabric data will reside in a single storage system called OneLake, which users will be able to access as local files on PCs, much how Microsoft’s OneDrive file syncing and sharing service works for Microsoft 365 productivity software customers.
Users can read and act on data stored in Amazon Web Services S3 and Google Cloud Platform’s Google Cloud Storage without making copies.
According to Ulagaratchagan, Microsoft began working on Fabric two years ago. The company has yet to reveal pricing.
Microsoft also announced on Tuesday that it will begin a preview of Windows Copilot on its Windows 11 operating system in June.
“Just like you would with Bing Chat, you can ask Windows Copilot a range of questions from simple to complex,” Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, wrote in a blog post.
