AI in Azure: Deriving Value From Your Data

While the AI marketing hype rages on, companies are under pressure to get value out of their AI initiatives. Chatbots are fun, but where is the ROI for a business? Leadership is being tasked with developing and executing an AI strategy, but many companies treat that as wholly separate from their data strategy – which is wrong. The value of AI initiatives is derived from the quality and availability of your data; they are inextricably linked.

As the leader of the Apps Associates Microsoft Practice, customers often ask me about the biggest barrier to AI projects getting off the ground. I tell them that it’s the availability of relevant data to the AI workstream. Data movement can be labor-intensive, and enriching data for AI applications (i.e. generating embeddings and things of that nature) adds even more effort. The companies that are seeing value quickly from their AI initiatives are those that have a data strategy in place that focuses on making relevant data available to the teams and applications involved in AI work.

This is an area where Microsoft’s overall vision for their data and AI products is very well-aligned with customer needs. While one might argue that Microsoft’s previous product approach typically compelled you to use their products and only their products, that has changed. With Microsoft Fabric, specifically functions like mirroring and shortcuts, they have made significant investments in making it easier to analyze and visualize your data in Fabric, even if it’s not stored there. Most customers have more than one data platform in their environment, and Fabric embraces this reality.

With the scale of Azure and Fabric platforms, you may wonder how (and where) your data and AI converge on the platforms.

Here are four areas of the Microsoft ecosystem where I’m keeping my focus in 2026:

• Fabric Data Agents: these combine a conversational UI with the ability to plug into or trigger agentic workflows via integration with Copilot Studio and other tools.
• Microsoft Foundry: announced at Ignite in November, this brings AI-powered app and agent development under one virtual roof – and it’s natively built to connect to data in Fabric.
• Fabric IQ: “ontology” was the buzzword of the announcement, but what this really does is enable you to overlay your data with the language of your business. Say goodbye to setting synonyms on your semantic models that your AI agents don’t know and don’t understand. This is where Foundry and Fabric truly come together.
• Foundry IQ: similar to Fabric IQ, this is the technology that empowers you to apply the language of your business across your data and AI ecosystem. Even if the data and AI live in the same cloud, they’re not yet speaking the same language, but Foundry IQ and Fabric IQ make that a reality.

Most importantly, what does this mean for you? At Apps, we understand how AI and Data strategy are intricately intertwined. Ensuring your data is easily available to the AI services and workflows that you are leveraging is critical to the success of your AI initiatives. We have a deep knowledge of these services in Oracle, AWS, and other systems.

Because “time to value” is so critical in today’s fast-paced business climate, using data and AI services that are built to work together lets companies avoid long development cycles building bespoke components to feed data to your AI projects.

Cloud data and AI platforms are in a constant arms race, and you need a partner that can keep up. While we partner with Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, and others, our sole focus is the success of your data and AI initiatives, regardless of platform.

At Apps, we’ve been teaching about and working with Azure AI for nearly 10 years. We can help you cut through the hype of what AI is and isn’t around your data and build AI-powered solutions that will deliver real value to your business.

Start the conversation with our team today to get started on your real AI roadmap.