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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Making Good Data Agents, Testing Them at Scale, and Calling Them in Foundry
A Fabric Data Agent is easy to create and hard to trust. It answers almost any question with confidence, and without a way to grade those answers, you find out it's wrong when a user does.
This session follows a Data Agent through three stages. First, making it good: choosing and scoping data sources, writing instructions, and adding example queries that teach it how your data works.
Second, testing it at scale. One good answer in a chat window proves little, so we'll look at how the Fabric Data Agent SDK runs a whole set of questions against an agent, judges the answers, and shows where it fails.
Third, calling it from Microsoft Foundry. Through Fabric IQ, a Data Agent becomes a tool that a Foundry agent can call alongside its other sources. We'll cover how that works, what Foundry adds, and what to consider around routing, permissions, and monitoring.
You'll leave knowing how to build a Data Agent, prove it works, and put it to use beyond Fabric.
From Maps to Agents: Spatial Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric
Almost every dataset hides a location, the ultimate universal foreign key. Yet geographic data is often overlooked, poorly joined, or reduced to points on a map. The relationships it could reveal stay hidden. The first half of this session covers shaping and engineering spatial data in Microsoft Fabric using SQL and Python, so raw coordinates become geography you can join on, measure, and trust.
The second half covers how that data gets consumed. We'll bring it into interactive maps, Fabric apps, and AI agents that answer proximity and boundary questions in natural language. You'll see why the modeling work behind a good map is the same work that lets an agent reason about where things are.
You'll learn how to:
- Convert coordinates and query spatial data
- Run spatial joins and proximity analysis
- Build custom geographic boundaries
- Structure spatial data for maps, apps, and agents
No GIS background needed!
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!
Analytics That Act: Embedding Agents and Functions in Fabric Apps
For years, analytics has been passive: it surfaces insights, then leaves users to act on them. Fabric Data Agents, Fabric Apps, and App Functions change that. Users can ask a question, get an answer, and take action without leaving the application.
It starts with Data Agents. We'll look at what makes one reliable: choosing the right data sources, writing clear instructions and example queries, and validating answers. Then we'll organize several agents into a coordinated team that can handle questions no single agent can answer.
Fabric Apps is where users meet those agents. We'll embed the agent team directly in an app's interface, so conversation becomes part of the application instead of a separate chat window. We'll also cover the architecture that connects the app, the agents, and the data underneath.
App Functions close the loop. They let the app do something with an answer, whether that's starting a workflow or triggering the next action. We'll walk through orchestration patterns, including how agents suggest the right function at the right time, so users go from insight to action in one place.
You'll leave with a GitHub repository of repeatable labs, sample code, and reusable patterns for building your own agent-powered Fabric applications.
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
Day of Data St. Louis Sessionize Event
The Cloud & AI Summit 2026 Sessionize Event
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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