Brendan Daly
Principal | Enterprise Data & AI | Strategy • Architecture • Governance
St. Louis, Missouri, United States
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As a Principal Consultant, I help organizations use data effectively, turning it into practical, reliable solutions that drive meaningful business outcomes. My experience covers designing scalable data platforms, integrating AI into real-world applications, and guiding strategic technology decisions that directly support business leaders.
I focus on creating clarity around complex problems and ensuring that technical work always connects to clear organizational goals.
If you’re navigating challenges around data architecture, modernizing systems, or integrating AI in ways that make a difference, let’s connect.
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Build Something You Are Not Qualified to Build
The fastest way to expand your technical career is to get comfortable building things outside your current skillset. You will not be an expert on day one, and you do not need to be. You need a starting point, the right tools, and a willingness to learn by building.
In this session, we will follow the journey of a data professional with no front end development experience as we build and publish a professional portfolio website using AI, GitHub, and publish the result to the completely free GitHub Pages platform. Along the way, we will cover how to approach unfamiliar technology, use AI to accelerate the learning process, and turn your existing projects, experience, and accomplishments into a portfolio that demonstrates what you can actually do.
You will leave with a clear roadmap for building and publishing your own free portfolio website and, more importantly, a framework for confidently stepping outside your comfort zone and tackling the next skill you have been telling yourself is not your area.
An Introduction to Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric
This session is an introduction to Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric for data professionals who already know their way around Fabric or Power BI but have not yet worked with the streaming side of the platform. Most of us came to Fabric through pipelines, lakehouses, and warehouses, where data lands on a schedule and refreshes a few times a day. Real-Time Intelligence is built for data that keeps arriving. Sensor readings, application logs, clickstreams, change feeds. Anything that produces events faster than a nightly load can handle.
We'll cover the whole workload and how the pieces fit together. The Real-Time Hub is where streaming sources get discovered and connected across your organization. Eventstreams ingest and transform events as they flow in. Eventhouses store the data and KQL is how you query it. Real-Time Dashboards show what is happening right now, and Activator turns a condition in the data into an alert or an action. We'll also look at how streaming data connects back to OneLake and the rest of Fabric, and how Real-Time Intelligence works with the various types of agents built into Fabric.
If you already have streaming investments in Azure, we'll talk about how those carry over. Real-Time Intelligence is built on the same services underneath, so existing Event Hubs, IoT Hubs, and Azure Data Explorer databases can be connected or brought into Fabric with far less effort than a rebuild.
Expect plenty of demos so you can see what these items look like in practice and how much you can do without writing code. You'll leave knowing what each part of the workload does, which ones matter for a given scenario, and where to start with your own first stream.
No streaming or KQL background required!
Rethinking Embedded Analytics With Fabric Data Agents and Fabric Apps
Microsoft Fabric Data Agents are now generally available and consumable over an API, which means you can put a governed, natural-language analytics experience directly inside your own application. The question is no longer whether you can do it, but how to do it cleanly.
This is a hands-on, demo-driven session where we build the whole thing live. We'll start by creating and publishing a Fabric Data Agent, covering the best practices that make an agent actually reliable: data source selection, instructions, and validation. From there we'll set up the app registration that lets an application authenticate to the agent securely.
Finally, we'll embed the agent into a Fabric application built with Rayfin, the open-source SDK for building apps that run on Fabric, ending with a working conversational analytics experience inside a real app.
You won't leave with just concepts. We'll share a GitHub repo with repeatable labs and example patterns you can use to accelerate embedding agents into your own applications, so you can go from this session to a working build of your own.
Maps in Power BI: From Basic Geography to Production-Ready Spatial Analytics
Maps are one of the most requested, and most misused, visuals in the Microsoft data stack. Most reports lean on a default map without understanding the options behind it, the tradeoffs between them, or when a map actually adds analytical value.
This session walks through the map types available across Power BI and Fabric and what each one is built for, then digs into custom shapes and boundaries for sales territories, service areas, and districts. From there we'll look at where maps really earn their place: real-time data. We'll cover the new Fabric Maps item and how it pairs with Real-Time Intelligence, binding map layers directly to streaming data so they update as events arrive, and close with a live demo of a real-time mapping scenario built on RTI.
You'll leave knowing not just how to build maps, but which type fits which job, and how spatial context turns live operational data into something you can act on.
You'll learn:
- The map types available across Power BI and Fabric, and what each does well
- How to work with custom shapes and boundaries for territories and regions
- Why maps are a natural fit for real-time and streaming data
- What the new Fabric Maps item adds in Real-Time Intelligence
- Best practices for performance, privacy, and governance for GIS in reporting
From Where to Why: Engineering Geospatial Data in Microsoft Fabric
Almost every dataset has a location hidden in it: an address, a coordinate, a region code, a store ID that's really a place. That makes location the closest thing we have to a universal foreign key, a column you can join almost anything on, if you can get it clean and consistent. This session is about doing exactly that in Microsoft Fabric.
This session focuses on how to work with spatial data inside Microsoft Fabric: storing and querying location data, applying spatial SQL functions to calculate distance, containment, and intersection, and enriching raw coordinates with real-world context using Azure Maps and other Azure services. We'll walk through practical patterns for geocoding, boundary lookups, and spatial enrichment, and how to land that enriched data in a governed, reusable form for downstream analytics.
The emphasis is on the engineering layer, getting clean, contextualized spatial data ready to use. (Bringing that data to life visually in Power BI is the subject of a companion session.)
You'll learn:
- How to store and query spatial data in Microsoft Fabric
- Core spatial SQL functions for distance, containment, and intersection
- How to enrich raw coordinates using Azure Maps geocoding and Azure services
- Patterns for spatial enrichment and boundary lookups at scale
- How to land enriched location data as a governed, reusable asset
Day of Data St. Louis Sessionize Event Upcoming
The Cloud & AI Summit 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Saint Louis Microsoft Fabric/Power BI Meetup Group User group Sessionize Event
Brendan Daly
Principal | Enterprise Data & AI | Strategy • Architecture • Governance
St. Louis, Missouri, United States
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