Microsoft Ignite 2025 marked a pivotal turning point for those involved in data, analytics, and artificial intelligence.

The key announcement? The birth of the “Unified Context Layer”: a true semantic brain that unifies data, context, and intelligence across the entire corporate data estate. Here’s what that means, in practical terms, for professionals in the data & AI world.

The Unified Context Layer: one brain for all your data

Today, enterprise data lives in silos: collaboration (M365), analytics (Power BI/Fabric), and custom apps (Azure/on-premises). AI agents have to “guess” the context, running the risk of errors and hallucinations.

Microsoft’s answer to all this is a unified platform composed of three layers:

• Work IQ: the productivity brain, integrated into Copilot for M365, with persistent conversational memory and reasoning over SharePoint metadata.

• Fabric IQ: il nuovo semantic layer di business, che estende il modello semantico di Power BI a tutte le operazioni aziendali, su dati nativi e federati via OneLake.

At the core of Fabric IQ is the Ontology object.
Ontology defines a formal model of your company that captures the important things, how they relate to each other, the rules that govern them, and the actions that can be taken on them. It becomes the shared language that both teams and AI can use to reason about the company and act in real time

• Foundry IQ: the intelligent RAG engine, based on Azure AI Search, which orchestrates agentic retrieval across all information sources, while respecting governance and permissions

These three layers work together to provide integrated, reliable, and contextualized answers, drastically reducing the typical hallucinations of LLMs thanks to semantic coherence, intelligent retrieval, and long-term memory.

Practical Example
Let’s imagine a sales manager who wants to know:
“How is the sales pipeline performing compared to Q4 last year? Have any delays emerged in conversations with customers?”

• Without the Unified IQ Layer: The manager would need to consult the CRM or Power BI for the numbers, Teams and emails for the conversations, and then manually cross-reference the information to determine if there are any delays.
• With Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ integrated:
  • Fabric IQ recognizes “pipeline” as a business entity, with all the correct measures, dimensions, and filters.
  • Work IQ provides access to Teams conversations and emails, with the right context and memory of previous interactions.
  • Foundry IQ orchestrates the search across both sources, connects relevant signals (for example, emails discussing onboarding delays in certain regions), and synthesizes a response that includes both quantitative data (Q4 vs Q4-1 comparative numbers) and qualitative insights (evidence from conversations), all while respecting permissions and corporate governance.

Microsoft’s vision is clear: to make Fabric the convergence point for enterprise data, model the business with Fabric IQ, and let Copilot, Foundry, and agents automate work and decisions on a unified, secure, and governed context.

Boom, done 💣!

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