Microsoft Build 2026 made one thing clear: the AI agent is no longer a chatbot bolted onto an app - it's becoming a core layer of the enterprise stack, sitting alongside your data, your platform, and within your security perimeter. From Fabric to Foundry to Agent 365, this year's announcements form a consistent story: agents need trusted data to reason over, robust infrastructure to run on, and governance to keep them accountable. Whether you're setting strategy or writing the code, our team has collated the key announcements and what matters from this year's Build.
Microsoft Fabric: The Data Foundation for Agents
To solve the issue of AI agents lacking shared business context, Microsoft is positioning Fabric as the ultimate production-ready backend.
Fabric Apps and the Rayfin SDK (Preview): Microsoft introduced an AI-first approach to building custom enterprise web apps. With the new open-source Rayfin SDK and CLI, developers and coding agents can define a complete application backend as code - including data models, APIs, and access policies - using Fabric as the host.
Agent Skills for Power BI (Preview): Power BI is getting true end-to-end agentic capabilities. Users can now describe what they need (or even provide a screenshot), and the AI agent will automatically create the semantic models, generate the report, and iterate on the visuals.
Azure AI Foundry: Building and Scaling AI Agents
Foundry's updates focus on streamlining the developer workflow, from testing cutting-edge models to deploying multi-agent systems at scale.
Azure Content Understanding (ACU): New prebuilt analysers are now available directly in Foundry, simplifying how agentic applications parse, classify, and extract data from complex unstructured documents and images.
Next-Gen MAI Models: The Microsoft Foundry Model Catalog has been expanded with new in-house models, including MAI-Image-2.5 (featuring advanced image-to-image editing) and MAI-Transcribe-1.5 (improving speech-to-text accuracy).
Procedural Memory for Agents (Preview): Foundry Agent Service now includes procedural memory, a major step forward that allows agents to learn how to do work across multiple runs, rather than just remembering user facts or conversation history.
Cross-Platform: Secure AI by Default
Because agents are quickly becoming a new layer of the application stack, Microsoft also announced tools to help security teams maintain governance without slowing developers down.
Agent 365 SDK (GA) & Registry: Microsoft launched the Agent 365 SDK to help developers bake observability, access controls, and compliance directly into their agents from day one. IT teams also get a new Agent 365 Agent Registry to discover and manage local AI agents across the enterprise, curbing shadow AI sprawl.
Taken together, these announcements point to a shift from experimenting with AI agents to putting them in production, with Fabric providing the shared business context, Foundry providing the tools to build and scale, and Agent 365 providing the guardrails to do it safely.
The key takeaway for us is agents are only as good as the data foundation and governance model beneath them.
Want to talk through what these updates mean for your Fabric or Foundry roadmap? Get in touch with the team - we're already exploring how several of these previews fit into client environments and would love to share what we're seeing.