Modern data estates are increasingly multi-cloud and multi-platform, but most organisations still pay a “data movement tax” in the form of duplicated copies, brittle pipelines, and long lead times to deliver analytics and AI. In this session, you’ll learn how Microsoft OneLake provides a single, unified logical data lake (often described as a “OneDrive for data”), giving you a consistent foundation for storage, access, and governance across Fabric workloads.

We’ll explore two key capabilities that enable zero-copy (or minimal-copy) architecture patterns: OneLake shortcuts and mirroring. You’ll see how shortcuts can provide virtualised access to data without creating yet another replicated dataset, and how mirroring can bring external data closer to Fabric experiences while reducing the need for custom ingestion engineering. We’ll also connect these patterns to the broader Fabric momentum, including where Microsoft called out expanding OneLake capabilities and mirroring innovations across common enterprise platforms.

The AI payoff is the centrepiece of this talk: when data is unified and discoverable in OneLake, you can ground Copilot and other Fabric AI experiences in governed, shared enterprise data-accelerating exploration, transformation, and insight generation while reducing the friction of “where is the data?” and “can I trust it?”. We’ll discuss practical patterns for making data AI-ready (shared semantics, curated access paths, and discoverability) so that AI outputs are anchored in consistent definitions and controlled access.

Finally, we’ll show how the same zero-copy approach shortens the path to real-time outcomes, pairing OneLake-based foundations with Fabric’s Real-Time Intelligence capabilities to ingest, analyse, visualise, and act on data in motion.

You’ll leave with a practical blueprint for delivering multi-cloud, zero-copy Fabric architectures that are faster to implement, simpler to govern, and built to power AI and real-time decisioning from day one.