Hi Dotikers!

When Microsoft announces something at Ignite, you usually get the buzzword bingo. Except this time, with Fabric IQ and its semantic ontology layer, something tangible is actually happening. And it's by comparing it with Palantir that you really grasp what's at stake.

Both giants start from the same observation: enterprise data is organized chaos where every team has its own definition of "customer," "order," or "risk." To fix this, both propose an ontology, a layer that gives meaning to raw data by modeling business entities and their relationships. So far, nothing new. What changes is the philosophy.

Palantir, with Foundry, has been building a prescriptive system for years where the ontology is the core of everything: typed objects, navigable relationships, governed actions. It's powerful, battle-tested in military and industrial settings, but it's also a closed ecosystem, expensive, and one that creates a dependency that's hard to walk away from. Palantir sells you the Rolls-Royce of ontology, then the road, then the toll booth.

Microsoft takes the problem from the opposite end. Fabric IQ leverages the 30 million Power BI semantic models already in production to bootstrap the ontology, with a no-code tool accessible to business users. The goal isn't just to let analysts explore a graph, but to give AI agents a semantic backbone to reason and act autonomously, within an auditable framework. The bet is on semantic contracts: business rules embedded directly into the ontology so that agents know what they're allowed to do.

Microsoft's approach is the right one. Not because it's perfect, analysts rightly point out that ontologies don't build themselves and that lock-in remains a real concern. But because it democratizes a concept that was until now reserved for companies able to write seven-figure checks to Palantir. And in the race toward autonomous agents, whoever makes ontology accessible to the greatest number holds a decisive structural advantage.

Alex.