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FabCon Barcelona 2026: Our Top Picks

Oct 12
2 min read

Nearly 5,000 data professionals gathered in Barcelona for FabCon and SQLCon Europe. We sifted through the announcements, so you don't have to. Here's what stood out and what it means for you. 


The big picture 

This year's message was simple: Microsoft Fabric is no longer just where your data lives. It now feeds Copilot and AI agents directly. The quality of your data models and governance now decides the quality of your AI answers. 







Top picks 


Apps in Power BI / Fabric Apps (Preview) 

  • Agentic app creation in Power BI Desktop: start from a semantic model, describe the app in natural language, then preview, edit and publish it to Fabric. 

  • Coming in preview to Power BI Pro and PPU customers at no additional cost, including Fabric Database capabilities up to 1 GB per app. Fabric Apps also gains backend functions, storage, data connectors, PostgreSQL, built-in app metrics and a clearer enterprise access model. 


F0 & On-demand Billing (Coming soon) 

  • F0 is a zero-provisioned SKU with no upfront compute charge and on-demand billing on by default; pricing has not been published yet. 

  • Capacity overage is GA, keeping capacity out of throttling at three times the pay-as-you-go rate, and F4096 and F8192 SKUs are generally available. 


Fabric IQ in Microsoft Copilot (General Availability) 

  • It brings insights from trusted Power BI semantic models and reports into the flow of work, with answers grounded in the organisation's existing definitions and metrics. 

  • This comes without additional AI token costs, and integration into the new Code experience is coming soon via the Frontier program. 


Data Engineering Agent (Preview) 

  • Built on technology from the Osmos acquisition, it handles long-running work like migrations, schema harmonisation and ETL, planning, executing and validating on Fabric Spark. 

  • It can be steered from GitHub Copilot, VS Code, Codex and Claude Code. 


Data Factory & ADF/Synapse Migration (Rolling out) 

  • More than 45 new capabilities, including new sources, stronger replication governance, new destinations, more resilient pipelines, richer monitoring and AI assistance. 

  • A three-step upgrade path: "View in Fabric" brings ADF/Synapse environments into a workspace, a built-in assessment flags readiness, then pipelines are upgraded incrementally. 


Final thoughts 

Barcelona made one thing clear: Fabric is becoming the engine behind how organisations use AI, not just where their data sits. Some of these features are ready today, while others are still in preview or waiting on pricing, so it pays to separate what you can act on now from what to keep an eye on. Whatever your role, the best next step is the same: make sure your data and semantic models are in good shape, because that’s what everything else builds on. 

 
 
 

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