Microsoft Fabric, Power BI

Episode 316 – 2024 Recap and 2026 Predictions: Looking Back and Looking Forward

January 14, 2026

Welcome to what might be the most fun episode of the year! Jason and John are kicking off 2026 by doing something they haven’t done since the end of 2023 – grading their predictions and making bold new ones for the year ahead. And folks, they did pretty darn well with their 2024 forecast. Let’s dive into how their crystal balls performed and what they’re seeing on the horizon.

Life Updates: Finals, Family Travel, and Avatar

Before jumping into predictions, Jason set the stage with some personal wins. It’s the last day of finals for his kids in 2025 – both surviving sophomore and senior year respectively, complete with marching band season and play season. As Jason put it, “it’s been a tough one” but they’re coming out the other side ready for 2026.

The family has some travel planned to places Jason hasn’t been before, notching off a new country while the kids get a new state. Plus, new season of Shoresy is dropping (which, according to Jason, is “far and away better than Letterkenny” – strong words!), and they’re headed to see Avatar in IMAX that evening. His younger son is so excited about the Doomsday trailer that he removed all social media from his phone to avoid spoilers. That’s dedication.

But beyond family updates, Jason teased some exciting things brewing for 2026: “Some of the things that you and I are working on are sparking up in a fun way.” John’s response? “Well, now that you’ve teased it all, now you’re going to have to come through.” Stay tuned, folks.

The 2024 Report Card: How’d They Do?

Jason took their 2023/2024 prediction episode transcript, ran it through AI, and had it pull out their predictions to grade them not just for 2024, but extending through 2025 as well. Spoiler alert: they crushed it.

John’s Predictions

Microsoft Recommits to First Party Events (In Person)
Grade: Miss for 2024, Partial for 2025 (John disputes this)

John’s take? He’s calling this a win. Yes, Microsoft didn’t bring back true first-party events like the old SharePoint Conference with 30,000 attendees when CJ ran it. But as John argued, “I don’t really care who’s running it. I care about the level of noise.”

When Microsoft started advertising these third-party conferences in Teams, when Jeff Teper, Adam Harmetz, and Jason Moore showed up at ESPC (European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference) with 100+ Microsoft employees, and when Ignite expanded significantly – that’s a philosophical reversal. As Jason noted, “It felt different in 2023 than it did in 2025.” The investment is there, even if the liability insurance isn’t Microsoft’s problem.

John’s calling this one a win, and honestly, that’s fair.

AI Hype Cools Slightly, But Doesn’t Crash
Grade: Win for both 2024 and 2025

This aged “extremely well” according to the AI analysis. AI normalized, budgets tightened, and Copilot positioned as a productivity tool rather than magic.

Jason initially pushed back: “I don’t think anything’s cooled.” But John clarified – it’s not that the hype disappeared, it’s that “it’s gone from pure hype in 2023 to in 2025, there’s meat on the bones.” The bubble hasn’t burst; it’s just evolved from inflated expectations to actual value delivery. The prediction was that it wouldn’t crash, and it didn’t. Win.

Power BI Service is Viable for Classic Report Building
Grade: Partial for 2024, Uber Win for 2025

As John noted, “You can now do your Power Query in the service, and that was the last piece.” It’s still not as full-featured as desktop, but it’s viable. For classic report building – which Jason emphasized as the key qualifier – this is an 80%+ solution now.

The service has come a long way, and for the majority of people who don’t need deep M geekery or every connector under the sun, you can build real reports entirely in the service. Solid win.

Unlimited Power BI Sharing for All Fabric SKUs via Direct Lake
Grade: Miss and Miss

John was direct: “They kept the licensing model, the separate licensing model for Power BI. I think it’s a mistake.”

But here’s where it gets interesting – John immediately said “it’s really funny because in another form or similar form, it’s one of my predictions for this year.” Jason’s response: “I think that’s going to be one of the ones that we’re aligning on there.” Foreshadowing!

As John explained, “It makes too much commercial sense for them not to do it.” Watch this space for 2026.

Fabric Community Conference Becomes Annual
Grade: Win for both years

FabCon is absolutely a real thing now. Adam Saxon is doing great work, and as Jason noted, they’re hearing “just great things coming out of Microsoft right now about the Atlanta version.”

The conference has changed hands on the backend, they’re marketing it differently, and it’s co-located with SQLCon in 2026 (March 16-20 in Atlanta). The initial speaker catalog just dropped with a lot of M365 folks and new speakers who haven’t done FabCon before. John’s going; Jason can’t make it because it’s over his birthday during his kid’s senior year spring break.

John’s Final Score: 2 misses, 2 wins, 1 partial became 4 wins and 1 miss when looking through 2025.

Jason’s Predictions

Jason went 5 for 5. No misses. Let’s break them down.

Fabric APIs Arrive End Matter
Grade: Partial in 2024, Full Win in 2025

Everything has to have an API these days, and as John explained, “The directive is for anything to be GA in Fabric, it has to support CICD and that means it’s going to be at the backend automatable.” APIs are everywhere now. Win.

Copilot Meaningfully Expands into Power BI Desktop
Grade: Full Win

This called it partial, but both hosts agreed – full win. Copilot has expanded significantly into Desktop with real, meaningful capabilities.

Copilot Shifts to Starting Work, Not Finishing
Grade: Win

As John noted, “I’m not sure it ever was finishing work.” But the prediction held – Copilot has moved from a 60% solution to an 80% solution, particularly for Power BI. Jason highlighted features like organizational themes designated for Copilot use making a real difference.

Fabric Becomes Programmatically Enterprise Ready
Grade: Win

Related to prediction #1, this is about the ecosystem of APIs, CICD support, and programmatic control. Fabric is absolutely enterprise-ready from an automation standpoint now.

Fabric Community Conference Becomes the Ecosystem’s Anchor
Grade: Win

Same as John’s prediction – FabCon is one of the larger Microsoft ecosystem conferences now, and Microsoft’s investment shows they’re treating it that way.

Jason’s Final Score: 5 wins, 0 misses. The AI said Jason “clearly won.” John’s response: “I think we’re going to dispute that here in just a minute.”

Combined Score: 9 wins, 1 miss between them. That’s pretty impressive crystal ball work.

2026 Predictions: What’s Coming Next

Now for the fun part – what do these two data wizards see coming in 2026? They haven’t synced up their lists beforehand, so there’s genuine surprise (and some overlap) as they alternate predictions.

John’s Prediction #1: Real-Time Intelligence Goes Mainstream

John doesn’t know how bold this is, but he’s calling it: “The real-time workload is going to become mainstream in Fabric.”

A lot of people still tiptoe around RTI, wondering what it is. But the investment Microsoft’s pouring in makes it hard to avoid anymore. Things like workspace monitoring and capacity monitoring lean on real-time because “it’s monitoring, not reporting so much.”

John’s got a big project at work where real-time is a core component – but not for monitoring. He’s using it in an ETL way, which is interesting. “ETL real-time” as he described it.

The increased focus we saw at Ignite (including Fabric IQ, though more on that later) suggests RTI is moving from niche to necessary.

Jason’s Prediction #1: Databases Take Center Stage

Jason’s going complementary but different: “Databases is going to take center stage in Fabric in 2026.”

Databases went GA at Ignite – both SQL database and Cosmos DB in Fabric are now generally available. Jason thinks 2026 will see a major shift in how Microsoft positions Fabric.

“They want Fabric to be the data platform as opposed to the analytics platform,” Jason explained. We’re going to see that shift in language from “analytics platform” to “data platform.”

Evidence? Microsoft got rid of Data Science as a separate workload. They’re emphasizing OneLake as foundational. From an engines perspective, from a workload perspective – data is king. The ability to go from a notebook directly to SQL (something new) shows they’re making this more approachable.

Jason doesn’t think they’re minimizing Azure SQL or on-prem SQL. Instead, they’re elevating Fabric databases to center stage as where you really want to build if you’re doing analytics. “It’s now a data-centric platform as opposed to an analytics-centric platform.”

John’s reaction: “I agree with you. I agree.” Specifically pointing out transactional databases – they’ve got SQL and Cosmos in GA, more are coming, and it makes perfect sense. “That ubiquitous platform where you can do it all within the context of Fabric burning down your CUs, with that single billing model, that single data layer – it makes perfect sense.”

John’s Prediction #2: Semantic Modeling Becomes More Approachable

John’s flipping over to Power BI for this one: “Modeling or building semantic models is going to become a whole lot more approachable over the next year.”

We’ve already got Copilot features that help with this – describe your measure and it shows you the calc. There’s the modeling MCP server so you can plug in other AI tools to build your semantic model.

John can see a future where “I can just talk to my Fabric interface and say, build me a semantic model that does these things, and it goes off and does that and I can immediately start building a report on top of that.”

That’s not there now, but he sees it coming in 2026.

Jason’s Prediction #2: Copilot Shows Up in Trial Capacities

Jason pulled this one forward in his list because it directly supports John’s prediction. “In order to do that, I think we’re going to see Copilot show up in trial capacities this year.”

His logic is solid: Trial capacities are the gateway drug. They’re meant for people to test things out. If you’re trying to make Copilot make everything more approachable, “it’s got to be something that when you’re playing with it, it becomes easier.”

The chicken-and-egg problem: “We’re building all of this great Copiloting stuff in Fabric to make this easier for people to do, but we’re not going to give it to you until you pay for it. But we’re trying to get you to pay for it.”

As Jason noted, Arun Ulag and the leadership team understand the business side. They’ve built amazing features, and to get the adoption they need for hockey-stick growth, people have to see the value. “The way you do that is through the trial.”

The five-minutes-to-wow metric matters. “The way that you get that five minutes down and that you get people to make it sticky is through Copilot at this point.” And the only way people can utilize it is if it’s in the trial.

Jason thinks they’re getting to a fit-and-finish spot with these features where putting Copilot in trial makes sense this year.

John’s take: “I think you’re right. I think you’re right. Well, I’m hoping that comes true.”

John’s Prediction #3: OneLake Becomes OneLake (For Real This Time)

This is an interesting one. John’s vision: “We’ve had OneLake. OneLake is that layer, but it’s kind of not necessarily been fulfilling the vision for it.”

The breakthrough is OneLake security, which just showed up in preview. We’re seeing more engines respecting it more broadly. “When we can truly move that security layer to OneLake, we can truly think of OneLake as that one layer where your data lives versus where I can get access to that data for whatever purpose I may need it for.”

We’ll still have primary data stored in native formats (SQL databases, mirrored data that’s read-only in OneLake, Event House where you have to turn it on). That’s fine as long as engines respect the security model, and that’s what’s being built in.

“Given that that’s going to be kind of all automatic, you don’t have to think twice about it – I think this is the year that OneLake will be front and center.”

Jason’s excited by this, particularly noting that having Josh Kaplan leading it gives him confidence. John added: “Shortcuts are amazing.”

Jason & John’s Joint Prediction: Data Agents Get Rapid Adoption

This was the one they both had on their lists independently!

Jason’s take: “Data agents are going to get rapid adoption this year.” Now that you don’t have to bridge them through Copilot Studio, everybody wants to just be able to talk to their data and ask questions.

With semantic modeling getting easier (John’s prediction), and the ability to add a semantic model into a data agent and ask questions from Teams – that’s where data agents really shine. “That’s going to provide a rapid adoption mentality for ‘let’s go ask questions of our data,’ and then it will bring people over and into the Power BI reports because it’s going to draw them back in.”

John fully agreed: “You basically called it out – you can plug it into a semantic model. What’s the semantic model give you? It gives you context. It gives you the semantic understanding of the data, and that’s something that this particular tool understands and that’s something that most LLMs lack when it comes to data.”

Data agents are unique in the landscape because of that semantic model integration. They’re going to be a big deal in 2026.

Jason’s Prediction #3: UDFs and Trans Apps Get the Power Query Treatment

User-Defined Functions and transformation apps need a WYSIWYG interface, according to Jason. “It’s going to need that drag and drop. It’s the data wrangler type of thing where instead of I have to go write all of this code…”

Jason pointed to how Power Apps and Power Automate have implemented Copilot first approaches (which he’s not a fan of the way they’ve done it). For UDFs and trans apps to get broad adoption, “this is complex. This is not really as approachable.”

He doesn’t see the community building around it the way they did with Power Automate (when Jason and his circles were breaking Flow before it was public). “I think it needs a WYSIWYG interface in order to make this something that is approachable.”

John agreed on the problem: “It’s different personas putting different parts together and that’s disjointed.” The report designer isn’t necessarily the person building the UDF or doing the data engineering behind the scenes.

Jason clarified: “I think there’s going to be tiering to it. I think you need a low-code version of the pro-code version we have today. But I don’t think that the pro-code version should go away – that needs to continue to get better.”

Think of it like having both Power Automate and Azure Functions – you need both capabilities. “I think it needs a WYSIWYG interface,” but keep the pro-code version getting more robust.

John’s Prediction #4: Unlimited Power BI Sharing for All Fabric Capacities (With an Asterisk)

John’s repeating his missed prediction from 2024 – but with a twist this time.

“Power BI is going to get unlimited sharing for all Fabric capacities” – all the way down to F2, just like Copilot did.

The reasoning: “They did it with Copilot. That’s got COGS associated with it, and they’ve figured out that that’s possible to do.”

Sharing has consumption expense associated with it (when users interact with reports, that costs Microsoft). In your own Fabric capacity, you shouldn’t have to pay separately for that – or at least, you should be able to make that choice yourself.

John’s mechanism for making this work: Spark billing-style separation. There’s a separate billing model you can turn on for Spark workloads to exceed your capacity. “I think one of the ways they could accomplish this is by basically putting the report rendering workload, doing the same thing with the Spark capacity and be able to say, bill me separately for that.”

Either let people burn down their CUs or burn dollars on another spindle. One way or another, we need to get there “because it’s so hard to explain – everything is the same except for the Power BI report. Why can’t you share? Oh, because you need the Power BI Pro license. Why? It doesn’t make sense.”

Jason’s reaction: “Can’t say I disagree with you on that, John.”

This is the licensing change that could make everything click together. Watch this space.

Jason’s Prediction #4: Fabric IQ Isn’t Going to Take Off

Jason admitted this one’s a bit negative after trying to stay positive for his first predictions. “I don’t think Fabric IQ is going to take off in 2026.”

They made a big deal about it at Ignite, but Jason hasn’t heard more about it since. “I haven’t wrapped my head around it and I haven’t heard more about it.”

John asked the key question: “How much have you heard about it since Ignite?”

Jason’s test: Look at YouTube. Look at the folks who are “just a megaphone for everything that Microsoft says.” How many of them are doing Fabric IQ demos and content? “It’s been an echo chamber, John. It is. Hello. Like nothing.”

His prediction: “It’s going to be like OneLake security – three years later, oh we did this other thing and we call it something different.”

John’s note on his own data agents prediction: “Data agents are going to go big, but we won’t be talking about Fabric IQ.”

Brutal but probably accurate assessment.

Jason’s Prediction #5 (The Weird Bold One): Fabric Moves Closer to M365 Than Power Platform

Jason called this his “tea leaves moment” – pure feeling based on what he’s observing.

“I think Fabric is going to move closer to M365 than it is to the Power Platform at this point.”

The evidence: “When you look at the Microsoft marketing stuff that’s going on, there’s a whole lot of big deal about SharePoint right now and OneDrive, and I haven’t seen anything around Power Platform lately.”

The Fabric team seems more focused on Microsoft 365 world – integrating with Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive as both destination and source for Data Flows Gen2. “Where have you seen anything talking about Power Apps integration or Dataverse?”

John: “It’s a shortcut target.”

Jason: “Nothing new.”

The organizational shift matters too: Power Platform and Copilot Studio moved outside Scott Guthrie’s space to Rajesh (where Microsoft 365 is). “I’m just going to be curious which side of the world things get buddy buddy up on.”

Jason connected this to the licensing prediction: If F2 can support sharing, that supports a SharePoint story a lot better than requiring F64. “I think you and I may be all aligned on this without you even realizing it.”

No knowledge whatsoever on this one – purely observational. But interesting tea leaves to read.

What’s Coming for BIFocal

As they wrapped up, Jason teased what’s ahead: They’re meeting in Kona in February to plan content for the 2026 conference season. “We’re going to have some really great content coming out in the 2026 year. We’ve got some great things coming. Stick with us.”

John wished everyone happy holidays, and Jason closed with: “I hope that y’all are having a great 2026 when you’re listening to this.”

The Bottom Line

Looking back at their 2024 predictions: 9 wins, 1 miss. That’s an impressive batting average for technology forecasting.

Looking forward to 2026, the themes are clear:

  • Real-time and databases becoming foundational, not optional
  • Semantic modeling and Copilot making Fabric more accessible
  • OneLake security finally delivering on the unified vision
  • Data agents bridging the gap between questions and answers
  • Licensing simplification (hopefully) making Power BI sharing make sense
  • Low-code tooling for UDFs and trans apps bringing more people into the developer fold

And maybe, just maybe, Fabric gets a bit cozier with the M365 world while Fabric IQ quietly fades into the background.

We’ll check back in 12 months to see how these predictions held up. Based on their 2024 performance, betting against Jason and John doesn’t seem wise.

Links

Microsoft Fabric Blog Posts Referenced:

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