Recent News in Analytics and AI: March 2025 Edition

This month's summary of recent news in analytics and AI dives into new releases in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, including new streamlined integrations for improved user experience, the latest features added to Microsoft 365 Copilot, an insight into the secure features of the Azure AI products, the announcement of two new products from DeepSeek, as well as what when on at FabCon 2025 this week, and more. Each section presents three analytics and AI news highlights.

Read on and get up to speed.

Power BI

• Following on from the release of Microsoft Fabric and the Fabric capacity SKUs, Microsoft is now consolidating its product line. This means that new customers are unable to get the Microsoft Power BI Premium per capacity SKU (P-SKUs), as it has now been retired. However, if you're already a customer, don't worry. The current Power BI Premium product capabilities are not changing, and you'll be able to transition to a Microsoft Fabric SKU once your subscription period ends. Learn more.

• Microsoft has also updated preview in PowerPoint to allow the use of data point annotations. This means that the Power BI add-in for PowerPoint allows you to make your presentations more engaging. The annotations allow for descriptive text to be added to visuals to provide a better understanding. Learn more.

• The latest updates with Power BI Desktop mean that you're now able to use Direct Lake semantic models for editing directly from the internet. Similar to the way Office products work, you can use the Edit in Desktop (preview) function to access Power BI Desktop and get started. Learn more.

Microsoft Fabric

• FabCon 2025, the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, took place in Las Vegas and with it came a raft of exciting Fabric announcements. A new data security feature, OneLake security, was announced, along with performance enhancements and new capabilities in Fabric, like the preview of a new Command Line Interface (CLI). We recommend you spend some time understanding what these and the many other announcements mean for you and your organisation. Learn more.

• Microsoft has announced a new billing feature called Autoscale Billing for Spark in Microsoft Fabric. This is going to give you a lot more flexibility, combined with efficient costs for Spark workloads, especially if you're on a lower SKU. In fact, it may actually enable you to reduce the size of your capacity by shifting your heavy Spark workloads to autoscale billing. Learn more.

• The SKU requirement to use Copilot and AI capabilities in Microsoft Fabric will be removed. This means that by the end of April, if you have F2 or above, you can access Copilot, Fabric data agents, and more as part of your experience. This announcement is huge and will have a significant impact on your mileage with Fabric. Learn more.

Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio

• The Microsoft Copilot team introduced two new features to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Researcher and Analyst. Dubbed as 'first-of-their-kind' reasoning agents for work, they allow you to analyse large quantities of information but with highly secure access. Learn more.

• Microsoft Copilot Studio can now integrate a range of enterprise systems into your agents. This means you can now access data from Office applications, as well as sources such as Dataverse (Microsoft 365 Dynamics), Salesforce, ServiceNow, and local files. Learn more.

• After being announced at Ignite in 2024, Copilot Control System (CCS), Microsoft has released an update on where CCS stands today. The three main capabilities you need to know about here include security and governance, management controls, and measurement and reporting. Learn more.

Azure Analytics and AI

• ·Microsoft has released details on how its AI products are trained and run. As you have a read through, you'll see that this is emphasising the security that prevails across the likes of Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI Service. Take a look to see how this can help your work. Learn more.

• Databricks Workflows now contains a public preview of the Microsoft Power BI task type and is available on Azure, AWS, and GCP. Now that this task type is enabled, you'll be able to update and refresh Power BI semantic models within Databricks. Learn more.

• In a collaboration with NVIDIA, both NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA AgentIQ toolkit have been integrated into Azure AI Foundry. NVIDIA NIM™ is a component of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite and uses key technologies such as NVIDIA Triton Inference Server™, TensorRT™, TensorRT-LLM, and PyTorch for increased reliability, optimised workflows, and more. What this means for you is faster deployment and significantly better AI agent performance. Learn more.

Open-Source Analytics and AI

• The DeepSeek team has recently released two new projects – smallpond and 3FS. Despite beginnings in high-frequency trading (HFT), they are now infamously known as an AI lab after the launch of DeepSeek R1. Take a look at how you can use the new distributed filesystem 3FS, while running the distributed data engine smallpond on top of it. Learn more.

• DuckDB has released a newer version of delta extension with enhanced performance-related features. With the new release of delta extension 0.3.0, you'll see a noticeable increase in performance, and this is clear in the results of the industry standard TPC-DS benchmark with the scale factor 1 data set (SF1). Learn more.

• Hot on the heels of part 1 of a Velox Primer blog series highlighted in our February 2025 update, it's only natural that we also cover Part 2. Their latest blog post runs through how a distributed compute engine executes a similar query to what was covered in Part 1. There, you can learn how to go through the query setup and task setup processes, as well as how to run a leaf stage of a distributed query. Sound interesting? Learn more.

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