For many years, SQL Saturday conferences around the world have provided fantastic educational opportunities for professionals specializing in Microsoft tools such as Fabric, Power BI, and SQL Server. SQL Saturday Minnesota is coming up on September 27, 2025 and I was fortunately selected to be a presenter. I’ll be presenting on best practices for Fabric and Power BI Semantic Models when designing them for use with Copilots and Agentic AI tools such as AI Foundry and Copilot Studio.
Hint: Best practices for AI with Semantic Models is going to be a hot topic in coming years and an area where dimensional modeling experts will be in high demand!
My session is scheduled to precede the event raffle at the end of the day, and will be tailored for all audiences from beginners to advanced users. Many other Microsoft experts will also be presenting throughout the day:
Title: Fabric Semantic Models are the Foundation for good math with AI
Date: Saturday, 27 Sep 2025 3:15 pm – 4:15 pm CST (60 minutes)
Location: St. Paul College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
Registration link: https://sqlsaturday.com/2025-09-27-sqlsaturday1124/
Description:
We are currently experiencing a generational surge in AI use cases and transformation. But will AI be able to connect directly to your raw data, perform all the necessary transformations, apply business-friendly names to fields, and add accurate logic to solutions? Does data engineering and architecture still matter?
A well-known limitation of AI—specifically large language models (LLMs)—is that they are not fundamentally designed to perform accurate math. While newer LLMs can handle some mathematical tasks, query speeds are often slow, and the compute costs can be high. Translating the specialized context of natural language questions into precise logic also presents challenges. For example, if a business user asks, “Show me total sales for the year,” what exactly does “year” mean? Is it a calendar year, a fiscal year, or year-to-date? Now imagine how much more complex the math becomes with a question like, “Show average sales for blue and red widgets for customers in the East, excluding store holidays.”
Traditional best practices known by data professionals for decades provide a solid foundation for accurate math in AI-driven applications. These practices will continue to evolve as we design data architectures optimized for AI. Microsoft Fabric semantic models are a powerful tool for building that logic in a way that provides both context for accurate calculations and fast, efficient query performance. If you’re a data professional with skills in dimensional modeling, query optimization, ETL/ELT, RLS/OLS—your expertise is now more crucial than ever for AI solutions that require “good math.”
This presentation will explore strategic reasons for using semantic models as the foundation for AI when querying structured data. We’ll walk through a use case that begins with 275 million rows of raw data, demonstrates how to model the data for AI, leverages tools in Fabric semantic models to prepare the data, and then serves it to AI tools and agents using Fabric Data Agents, Power BI Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Again, here is the registration link and it would be great to see you there!: https://sqlsaturday.com/2025-09-27-sqlsaturday1124/
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