AI assistant — not human
Expert perspectives on SharePoint, Power BI, Azure, AI Governance, and Digital Transformation from enterprise consultants with 29 years of Fortune 500 experience.
By Errin O'Connor, Founder & Chief AI Architect, EPC Group
Blog — enterprise Microsoft consulting resource from EPC Group. We provide strategic guidance, implementation expertise, governance frameworks, and compliance-native delivery across the Microsoft ecosystem (Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Azure, AI Governance, Microsoft Copilot).
Popular: SharePoint Migration, Power BI, AI Governance, Azure
Three deep-dive pieces on the agentic AI governance problem most boards are not having yet, the AI spend & ROI conversation that ends pilot purgatory, and the non-human identity blind spot that turns shadow AI into a regulatory event. Read in any order — they cluster.
Blog 1 · AI Governance
Blog 2 · AI Strategy / vCAIO
Blog 3 · AI Governance / Security
"Silent AI" ended January 1, 2026, when ISO generative-AI exclusions (CG 40 47/48) went live. Here is what six insurance carriers told me they now require before they will renew AI-touching coverage — and the four court cases driving it.
Build 2026 reshaped Fabric's TCO math. Honest F-SKU costs vs Power BI Premium, real payback periods from 12 client engagements, and the hidden cost lines Microsoft's calculator omits.
A CIO board-prep framework for Build 2026 with the 5 strategic decisions that must land in Q3-Q4 2026: platform standardization, Agent 365, governance posture, compute budget, ROI measurement.
Build 2026 for Azure architects: HorizonDB, Cosmos DB enhancements, the Foundry agentic app stack, and what to architect around when every workload becomes an agent endpoint. EPC Group walks through the new reference architecture and where governance lives.
Operations agents in Microsoft Fabric reached GA at Build 2026. They watch your pipelines, capacities, and Power BI workspaces, and act when SLOs slip. EPC Group lays out the operations-agent architecture and how it turns Fabric and Power BI into a self-healing analytics estate.
Web IQ inside Foundry IQ changes how AI search agents read public web content. EPC Group covers Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and the schema + content moves that get your brand cited by Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini in 2026.
Agent 365 went GA May 1. The SDK shipped at Build. MXC ties Entra, Purview, and Defender to every agent. EPC Group walks through the agentic governance stack and how the Governed AI on Microsoft framework maps to it, control by control.
Agent Mode is now the Microsoft 365 Copilot default. Cowork ships, Scout is live in Frontier, and the Copilot Super App is "coming this summer." EPC Group covers what is shipping, what is teased, and the adoption + governance motion that turns it into ROI.
The RTX Spark superchip and DGX Spark redefine local AI for Windows. Aion runs on-device, MAI runs in Foundry, and MXC ties them together. EPC Group lays out the secure-AI-dev architecture for healthcare, finance, and government workloads that cannot leave the boundary.
Microsoft introduced the MAI family — seven new in-house cloud models including MAI-Thinking-1 and MAI-Code-1-Flash. EPC Group decodes what owning a frontier reasoning model means for enterprises, and how to govern a multi-model future without your CRM giving four different answers.
Microsoft Foundry is the multi-model control plane Microsoft just confirmed with OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, DeepSeek, and MAI all on one platform. EPC Group reads the Foundry IQ, ACS, and ASSERT trust stack — and what governance to build around agents before they go to production.
Fabric IQ is GA. Semantic models, certified ontologies, and operations agents change how analytics works in 2026. EPC Group, founding member of the Power BI Beta Team, lays out the semantic-model certification work that has to happen before AI grounds on your data.
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TL;DR — EPC Group publishes 200+ expert guides on Power BI, SharePoint, Azure, Microsoft 365, and AI governance. Our consultants have 29 years of enterprise Microsoft experience and 11,000+ engagements. Browse the latest articles below.
EPC Group is a Houston-based Microsoft consulting firm founded in 1997. Our blog covers practical guidance for enterprise Microsoft deployments — not vendor marketing. Topics include Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, SharePoint governance and migration, Azure cloud services, Microsoft 365 security, AI governance frameworks, and Copilot deployment.
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