Microsoft Acquires Osmos to Bring Agentic AI to Fabric and Make Autonomous Data Engineering Faster and More Efficient

Microsoft announced the acquisition of Osmos, an agentic AI data engineering platform built to simplify complex and time-consuming data workflows. The acquisition was confirmed in a January 5, 2026, post by Bogdan Crivat, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data Analytics, and positions Microsoft to accelerate its vision of autonomous data transformation within its unified analytics platform — Microsoft Fabric.

Bringing Agentic AI Directly into Microsoft Fabric

At the heart of Microsoft’s announcement is an effort to make data engineering faster, smarter, and increasingly autonomous. Osmos is known for pioneering “agentic AI” — AI systems capable of operating as intelligent agents that independently clean, reshape, and prepare data for analysis or machine learning models.

Integrating Osmos directly into Microsoft Fabric means data professionals and organizations can offload repetitive, manual data preparation tasks to self-directed AI agents. These agents can identify data inconsistencies, map schemas, perform transformations, and load structured assets directly into OneLake, Fabric’s core unified data lake.

This approach addresses a longstanding industry challenge. In most enterprises, analysts reportedly spend up to 80% of their time preparing data rather than analyzing it. By embedding Osmos technology within Fabric, Microsoft is offering what could become the first large-scale autonomous data engineering system native to an enterprise cloud platform.

Osmos: From Emerging Startup to Strategic AI Asset

Osmos rose to prominence over the past few years as a key innovator in data ingestion and transformation automation, using self-governing AI systems that learn from user input to streamline data workflows over time. Its platform could intelligently interpret file formats, detect data patterns, and build dynamic pipelines with minimal human configuration.

The company’s approach to “agentic AI” fell in perfect alignment with Microsoft’s evolving vision for Fabric — a unified, AI-powered data environment linking Power BI, Synapse, Data Factory, and machine learning services across Azure.

The acquisition not only brings Osmos’ technology under the Microsoft umbrella but also adds its team of AI data engineers and researchers to the Microsoft Fabric engineering group. According to Crivat, this partnership is aimed at “taking the next step toward a future where autonomous AI agents work alongside people — reducing operational overhead and making it easier for customers to connect, prepare, analyze, and share data.”

The Data Engineering Problem Microsoft Aims to Solve

Modern organizations face a paradox: they are generating unprecedented amounts of data, yet much of that data remains underutilized due to the complexity of cleaning, shaping, and moving it between systems. Manual data engineering has traditionally been the bottleneck that stalls analytics and AI adoption.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Osmos directly addresses this bottleneck. By empowering Fabric with AI-driven automation, customers will be able to:

• Ingest and clean data from multiple sources — including Excel, SQL, third-party APIs, and external warehouses — with minimal configuration.

• Automatically detect and correct errors or mismatched schemas, using AI insight to fill in missing metadata or context.

• Generate analytics-ready assets stored securely in OneLake, ready for real-time use in Power BI or Synapse Data Warehouse.

• Build pipelines with natural language commands, as AI agents interpret requests and autonomously construct workflows.

These capabilities align with Microsoft’s broader strategy to make AI “copilot every process,” extending beyond the user interface into the underlying data infrastructure itself.

How Osmos Strengthens Microsoft Fabric’s Architecture

Microsoft Fabric, launched globally in 2023, already integrates key components of analytics — data movement, transformation, warehousing, real-time monitoring, and visualization — into one unified SaaS platform. The addition of Osmos introduces what Crivat calls “agentic AI for data engineering,” providing a backbone of self-optimizing data workflows within Fabric.

OneLake, the central data lake at the core of Fabric, will benefit most immediately. Osmos’ data agents can automatically transform incoming raw data streams from unstructured or semi-structured sources into AI-ready formats, reducing latency and allowing near-instant analytics.

This means that Power BI dashboards, Copilot-driven analytics tools, and Fabric notebooks could all see faster refresh cycles and fewer errors, as the system proactively manages and repairs data instead of relying solely on human oversight.

Moreover, the autonomous data feedback loops enabled by Osmos integration could make Fabric a self-healing data ecosystem, where the system learns from users’ manual corrections and improves its future automation decisions.

Microsoft’s Broader AI and Data Vision

This acquisition reinforces Microsoft’s broader AI-first data strategy across Azure and Microsoft 365. Over the past two years, Microsoft has been investing heavily in making AI-driven experiences foundational — not just in user productivity apps like Copilot for Word or Excel, but in the underlying data pipelines that fuel enterprise intelligence.

Crivat emphasized that the Osmos acquisition is part of this mission to help organizations “unlock more value from their data faster, and with greater simplicity.” Having autonomous AI agents embedded in core infrastructure reduces the friction between data collection, transformation, and computation, thereby accelerating time-to-insight.

Notably, this move also complements Microsoft’s ongoing work with Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Studio, which together allow developers to train, fine-tune, and integrate custom AI models directly into data workflows. With Osmos now in the mix, those models can be trained on clean, high-quality data without extensive preprocessing — a common pain point that stymies many enterprise AI projects.

The Rise of “Autonomous Analytics”

Microsoft’s acquisition of Osmos doesn’t just enhance Fabric; it also signals a coming shift in the broader data analytics industry. The emerging concept of “autonomous analytics”—where data preparation, analysis, and optimization cycles operate automatically with AI guidance—is rapidly moving from theory to reality.

For Microsoft, the timing is optimal. Competing platforms like Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Databricks have made strides with automated ETL and AI-assisted data prep, but Microsoft’s integration of Osmos gives it a potential edge in delivering fully agentic AI operations within a unified enterprise data suite.

If successful, Fabric could become the first large-scale commercial platform where data pipelines build and maintain themselves, powered by AI agents that continuously adapt to changing business needs and data conditions.

What’s Next for Fabric and Osmos

Both companies have confirmed that the Osmos team will officially join Microsoft’s Fabric division under Bogdan Crivat’s leadership. Initial integration efforts will focus on embedding Osmos’ automation layer directly into the Fabric Data Factory and OneLake experiences, with wider capabilities expected to appear across the platform later this year.

Microsoft also hinted that this acquisition will expand Fabric’s appeal to developers and IT administrators by making it “simpler, more intuitive, and AI-ready” — language that aligns with its recent Copilot updates for Power BI and Azure Synapse.

Users can expect to see early previews of Osmos-based automation surfacing in Fabric workloads through Azure portal integrations, Copilot for Data, and new Fabric connectors that leverage AI for schema and data-matching tasks.

For ongoing updates, Microsoft pointed readers to the Microsoft Fabric Blog, suggesting more announcements will follow as the integration progresses.

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