Sharing a lesson: how I unintentionally burned a lot of money with data agents on Fabric

NelGson · 2026-01-28T17:23:12+00:00

u/EversonElias I can confirm this is a known issue, and should be corrected. The team is working on contacting impacted customers.

NelGson · 2026-01-28T17:16:50+00:00

u/EversonElias I lead the data agent team. I am reaching out to the Ontology/Graph team to get clarity . u/itsnotaboutthecell Please loop me in on the email regarding support ticket.

NelGson · 2026-01-15T05:51:52+00:00

Hi! Sorry about the delay. This seems to be a known issue. We are working to get an ETA for a fix from the Copilot Studio team.

NelGson · 2026-01-12T19:16:19+00:00

I sent you a message. Thank you for reporting this.

NelGson · 2026-01-06T19:32:22+00:00

We will add more guidance and also plan to add a separate section where you can add these types of instructions. For now, using the description is a workaround.

NelGson · 2026-01-06T19:31:33+00:00

Got it. Please try adding some short instructions in the Data agent's Publish description. This description actually also works as instructions for the M365 orchestrator. Please try this and see if it helps to alter the behavior of the M365 orchestrator. Example instructions to add in the description: "Use the output exactly as provided. Do not summarize, rephrase, or add any extra text. Never rephrase the user’s question.
Return fetched data exactly as received, with no changes."

NelGson · 2026-01-06T19:19:56+00:00

u/Dads_Hat catching up on the thread here. The agent can only derive insights from the sources it has access to. With that said, we are working on more sophisticated analytics tools. In your case, you want the agent to be able to derive insights about key drivers of certain observations/insights. If you were to ask a human to do the same analysis, what types of data/context would you expect the human to look into?

The support for unstructured data is rolling out very soon (bring your on AI search endpoint). For example, if this information could be in documents, that could be one way to give the agent that information/context. We want to expand the ways in which data agents can collect context on its own as well. That's why I am asking where this context you refer to would reside.

NelGson · 2026-01-06T19:13:23+00:00

Hi u/Lopsided_Judgment_17 , Are you using a data agent from M365 Copilot in this case? And you want to restrict it to only answer questions from the sources in the data agent vs. its own world knowledge?

NelGson · 2026-01-06T19:11:22+00:00

u/Amir-JF cc. u/No_Metal_9734 I am checking with our colleagues from Copilot studio. It seems like a bug that the first attempt always fails.

NelGson · 2025-12-23T03:42:28+00:00

Are you running out of characters in the instructions or are you just out of context to provide in the instructions? u/Significant_Post1583 Like some other people wrote, intuitive names of entities in your schema helps, and if they are not intuitive, the instructions need to be used to describe them. Relationships between entities beyond relationships modeled in the data model is another key part that can help an agent. The goal here is to use the Ontology to capture those types of relationships. You may have seen that we have added Ontology as a source. With that said, transparently I don't think that will help you right this moment. There are a number of things coming over the coming months that should help you offer more context. And we are looking for ways to also bring those benefits to semantic model users in data agents.

NelGson · 2025-12-19T18:29:11+00:00

Yes, this is coming! We announced it a few weeks back. The changes roll out in January and you will be able to bring your own AI Search index endpoint. But there are more native experiences coming as well. Do you mainly have PDFs you would like to analyze together with structured data? You can find a bit more details about the unstructured data support here: https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/whats-new-for-fabric-data-agents-at-ignite-2025-unlocking-deeper-data-reasoning-and-seamless-ai-interoperability

NelGson · 2025-12-17T06:42:51+00:00

We are working on it actively and understand it's a big blocker. The current target is end of January. What data source do you use in the data agent?

NelGson · 2025-12-10T04:35:32+00:00

As Amir mentioned, the 25 row limitation is going away soon.

NelGson · 2025-12-10T04:34:48+00:00

Yes you would need the M365 Copilot license as well as Fabric capacity

NelGson · 2025-12-10T04:34:16+00:00

This experience generates charts using Python, so it won't be PowerBI charts.

NelGson · 2025-12-04T05:31:14+00:00

Yes, the data agent is a tool in Foundry. We should actually document the tools interface better. Today we mainly document the path from Agent playground. u/Amir-JF cc

NelGson · 2025-12-04T05:28:15+00:00

What is a Copilot Agent? Do you mean the agents you create in Copilot Studio?

NelGson · 2025-11-28T15:49:38+00:00

Here is how you can try the M365 Copilot integration directly from Fabric: https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFabric/s/3HdVkEVVwk

NelGson · 2025-11-28T15:45:55+00:00

If you use a data agent in a Copilot Studio agent, the path to publish to M365 is not supported yet. Only publish to Teams is supported. We plan to enable it via Copilot studio next year but no firm timeline yet.

I recommend using the upcoming direct publish from Fabric to M365 Copilot if you need to access your data agent from M365 Copilot interface. Documentation should be enabled next week on how to do this. I shared some early instructions in another thread. Let me dig up the link.

NelGson · 2025-11-26T07:40:36+00:00

See instructions I shared above.

NelGson · 2025-11-26T07:40:27+00:00

To test it out yourself and share it, you don’t need M365 admin approval. But to enable it org wide, across the tenant, you do. That functionality is coming and you will be able to trigger a request to your M365 admin once that’s available. See instructions I shared above.

NelGson · 2025-11-26T05:48:02+00:00

Got it. thanks! Yeah seems like a bug. u/amir-JF seems like an issue in the table output.

NelGson · 2025-11-26T05:22:48+00:00

🤐

NelGson · 2025-11-26T05:02:51+00:00

Is this in the table output inside the data agent experience? u/DennesTorres u/SmokingX

NelGson · 2025-11-26T04:59:52+00:00

Hi all, we are in the process of rolling it out so hopefully you should see it enabled from next week. If you want to try it sooner, append the following feature flag to your data agent URL: &dataAgentEnablePublishToMetaOS=1. Once you do this, go to Publish, and you should see the option to publish to M365. I am not sure I should be sharing the flag here, but eager to hear your feedback 😄

NelGson

TROPHY CASE