Microsoft data and AI briefing, 26 October 2026: five developments that matter to anyone running a data and AI estate on the Microsoft platform. This roundup covers updates from 19 to 25 October alongside an earlier Copilot billing announcement that deserves attention now. Here is what they mean in practice. The thread running through all …
Time saved is not value. Reinvested time is. AI time savings do not automatically create business value. The value comes from what the organisation does with the time it gets back: the work it chooses, the person accountable for it and the outcomes it measures. This sounds obvious, and yet almost every AI business case …
I spent part of the weekend reading social media. There were posts from Data Saturdays around the world, reflections on panel discussions, and some thoughtful conversations about AI. Then I went to Facebook. 😂 One question caught my attention: would you hire someone who said they used AI for 90% of their work? The comments …
Prompt Generator is a free Microsoft 365 Copilot agent. Describe what you need in one rough line and it writes two or three ready-to-paste prompts using nine proven frameworks, then tells you which to run first. It is available now, and this post explains why I built it and what it will and will not …
A Copilot licence has a price you can put in a spreadsheet. The cost of an expert putting their name to a wrong answer is rather harder to calculate. That difference matters when you are trying to improve AI adoption. The business case promises faster work. The person responsible for the work may see more …
There has been a lot of noise on LinkedIn this year about the state of the technology job market, and AI is taking most of the blame. Some of that is overblown. Some of it is not. A feed cannot tell you what caused every decision, but from mine there is no question that database …
Everything in this series so far has been a component. This post is the assembly instructions. Over the past two months I have walked through the state of the 2026 recruitment market, the evidence bank, decoding adverts, tailoring CVs, the cover letter detection test, and mock interviews that push back. Each works on its own. …
Your Microsoft account team is probably already talking to you about Microsoft 365 E7. It reached general availability on 1 May 2026, it bundles E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Entra Suite and Agent 365 into a single suite, and moving customers from E5 to E7 is a stated priority for Microsoft’s field this fiscal year. …
If you have ever watched a production SQL Server grind to a crawl at 9am because forty people opened the same Power BI report, this session is for you. On Tuesday 29 September, David Postlethwaite and I are on stage at FabCon + SQLCon Europe in Barcelona to talk about Fabric Mirroring for SQL Server, …
A question came up in a Copilot workshop recently that I hear in some form on almost every engagement. Someone had been away for a week or two or even 3 months, came back to seventy unread emails, and wanted to know whether Copilot could tell them which ones actually mattered. The actual numbers here …