Ignite 2025: Microsoft introduces Fabric IQ and the ontology item
At Ignite 2025, Microsoft put Fabric IQ into public preview, including an ontology item that maps data to business entities, relationships and rules. Data agents can now be exposed as hosted MCP servers.
Microsoft Ignite opened on November 18, 2025. For anyone who cares about agents getting business data right, this is the biggest Fabric announcement of the year.
Fabric IQ, in public preview
- A new Fabric workload that maps data to business entities, the relationships between them and the rules that apply.
- The ontology item is part of Fabric IQ. It is where those entities, relationships and rules are defined.
- It builds on Power BI semantic models, which Microsoft says number about 20 million, so existing work on measures carries forward.
Data agents and related announcements
- Fabric data agents can be embedded in Microsoft 365 Copilot and exposed as hosted MCP servers, so other agents can call them. Microsoft did not state a release stage for these.
- Operations agents, a new agent type for Real-Time Intelligence.
- Foundry IQ, in public preview, gives Foundry agents a knowledge source, with Fabric IQ and OneLake listed as sources.
- Purview adds data loss prevention for Copilot prompts and an AI observability view, both in preview.
Why it matters
Until now, the place to describe what data means in Fabric was the semantic model, which is built for reporting: measures, dimensions, joins. Fabric IQ adds a place to describe the business itself. What is a customer, how does a customer relate to an order, which rules apply. That is a different and larger job.
It is also a job the platform cannot do on its own. The ontology item gives the structure. The content, what your business means by each term and who decided, has to come from your people. Companies that start capturing that knowledge now, while the item is in preview, will be ready when agents start depending on it.