Microsoft Ignite 2025 may be in the books, but the flurry of announcements, insights, and takeaways from last week’s event has left a sense of wonder and excitement for what’s to come in the world of AI. However, amidst this energy, for enterprise leaders, an overwhelming question remains: How can we successfully move past pilots and tap into AI for real, high-consequence business outcomes?
The groundbreaking stories shared throughout Ignite reminded the nearly 200K+ attendees that AI “is about doing things we could not do before.” It’s a call to action, imploring us to open our minds to all that is possible with Artificial Intelligence.
However, the reality might seem a bit more daunting. As Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial, articulated, “Frontier transformation is distinctively different from AI transformation.” He advised that, like any good journey, it’s important to reflect upon where you’ve been so that you can plot the course forward appropriately.
Frontier Transformation is not merely the adoption of new AI tools; it is a fundamental shift in business capability, enabling outcomes that were previously deemed impossible due to limitations in data access, speed, or processing power. As Microsoft highlighted, the distinction is crucial:
For enterprise leaders, this means moving beyond pilot projects and proof-of-concepts to building a fully integrated, intelligent system that can:
The key to plotting this course lies in the foundation of what drives AI: the data. Althoff shared that most AI projects often stall for four common reasons:
Successful frontier firms are moving past experimentation by building a new foundation for intelligence that is deeply integrated, contextual, and action-oriented. This is essential because current AI models often have to "infer" from data – a problem developers attempt to solve by "sipping data through a thousand tiny straws," resulting in engineering teams building thousands of brittle, low-context connections and dedicating most of their time to data integration rather than AI solution development.
Achieving true Frontier Transformation requires unifying this fragmented data and embedding business logic directly into the AI stack, a mandate driven by innovations such as Microsoft Fabric.
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Data & AI, Trility offers the expertise to transform your business, be profitable, and grow in new ways.
A major theme of the keynote was addressing the common pitfall in AI projects: failure due to a "sea of data quality issues" and the effort developers expend extracting value. To overcome this, Microsoft introduced a new intelligence layer designed to close the gap between structured and unstructured data. This new layer is a powerful, three-part system of IQ planes.
Work IQ is the intelligence layer for M365 Copilot. It goes beyond simple connectors, working across emails, documents, databases, and line-of-business systems to provide full, real-time context and secure access to a company’s internal workings by combining data, memory, and inference.
Fabric IQ is the semantic foundation for enterprise AI and the game-changer for data transformation and business logic. It extends the 20 million semantic models in Power BI to include your company’s business logic. This ensures humans and AI share a consistent, real-time understanding of the organization, moving data from mere analytics into operational use.
Foundry IQ is the unified knowledge layer for agents and the intelligent connection point that binds the entire knowledge ecosystem together. It is built on Azure AI Search and allows agents to plan, reason, and iterate across all structured and unstructured knowledge, including Work IQ, Fabric IQ, blob storage, and the web.
For companies focused on data transformation, Microsoft Fabric emerged as the single, unified platform powering this intelligence revolution. The key differentiator is Fabric IQ, which allows organizations to adopt the language of their business, defining entities and connecting them across all their data, whether in OneLake, Snowflake, Oracle, or Google BigQuery. By integrating your existing business logic, Fabric IQ turns generic AI responses into consistent, accurate, and actionable guidance for the business. This enables AI agents to make real-time, automated decisions with confidence, fueled by a deeper, shared understanding of business context.
The new intelligence layer and Microsoft Fabric are fundamental to the shift toward a distributed ecosystem of agents. Agents are the new frontier of work. By having access to Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ, an agent is not just inferring or guessing over data; it is armed with:
This ecosystem allows domain experts and citizen developers to build powerful agents using tools like Copilot Studio and App Builder, knowing that their creations are grounded in the same, trusted enterprise intelligence unified within Microsoft Fabric.
To handle the inevitable scale – with IDC predicting 1.3 billion agents deployed by 2028 – this ubiquitous innovation must be matched by control. That is why Agent 365 was introduced as the agent control plane, providing the unified visibility, governance, and security required to safely scale agents across the entire enterprise, regardless of where they were built.
So what comes next? To move past the initial excitement and begin plotting your course, here are 5 steps to take today to begin preparing your team to explore an AI-frontier journey:
Before diving into AI tooling, clearly define the business problems you are trying to solve. As Judson Althoff noted, AI projects most often fail first from a lack of a clear business strategy. Ensure your AI initiatives align with high-value business outcomes. For help defining use cases, consider Trility’s hands-on Copilot AI workshop to provide a clear framework for your teams to solve real-world business problems.
Address data silos and quality issues. AI is only as good as the data it relies on. Establish a unified data foundation, like Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake approach, to ensure your data is clean, accessible, and meaningful, moving past the sea of data quality issues.
Operationalize your organization’s unique knowledge. Leverage platforms like Fabric IQ to extend semantic models and explicitly include your company’s business logic. This ensures AI agents and humans share a consistent, accurate, real-time understanding of the business, enabling more actionable guidance.
Shift from siloed AI tools to a distributed ecosystem of agents. Equip these agents with the three intelligence planes – Work IQ (context), Fabric IQ (business logic), and Foundry IQ (connectivity) – to allow them to plan, reason, and take action across all structured and unstructured data, moving beyond simple data guessing.
Provide tools such as Copilot Studio and App Builder to enable domain experts and citizen developers to build powerful, grounded agents. This accelerates the development and deployment of AI solutions that are deeply rooted in trusted enterprise intelligence unified within your data platform.
If you are ready to partner on the next steps in your organization’s AI journey, reach out to our Microsoft experts today.
