NTT DATA Transforms Its Enterprise with Agentic AI in Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI Foundry

NTT DATA, a global business and technology services provider, adopted Microsoft Fabric to eclipse previous state-of-the-art solutions and achieve greater insights, faster decision making and scalable data-driven operations.

NTT DATA, Inc. adopted Microsoft Fabric data agents and Azure AI Agent Service to build conversational AI tools helping employees at all levels retrieve, interpret, and act on real-time data—enabling more intuitive, role-based access to insights.

The AI-driven platform improved productivity and empowered technical and non-technical teams with reliable decision support across their enterprise areas. Results have been decisive for NTT DATA's exploration of other multi-agent frameworks.

NTT Data is bringing their AI journey to the next level reliably and safely with Azure.

An innovation leader elevates outcomes by generating actionable insights

NTT DATA is one of the world’s largest IT service providers, earning $30 billion in annual revenue and serving clients in over 50 countries. With a full spectrum of business consulting and technology services, NTT DATA is the engine behind the digital transformation within many of the world’s most complex industries, from financial services and manufacturing to healthcare and government.

Innovation has always been central to the company’s identity. From advisory and infrastructure to applications, data strategy and much more, NTT DATA has built a reputation for helping businesses adapt faster and operate smarter. So, it’s no surprise that NTT DATA continues to be a leader in experimentation with and application of generative AI.

The company has conducted extensive pilots to understand how and where AI can deliver the most value, even as capabilities and methodologies evolve almost weekly. NTT DATA applies its own experience to help its clients derive the highest ROI from technology deployments.

"We know that Generative AI often feels like a black box," says Maureen Tan, head of the AI Center of Excellence within NTT DATA’s CIO office. "Our goal has been to simplify development and deployments while linking innovation to accelerate substantive and positive business outcomes."

The potential for tremendous gains through AI has always been clear. The challenge is actually deriving that value. In one instance in particular, NTT DATA wanted to get insights from data faster than existing solutions—reporting and visualization tools, automation platforms and robotic process automation (RPA)—could deliver. Like many global enterprises, the company’s data was both deep and widespread. The question was how to best access, organize and derive maximum value from the data.

“Legacy dashboards are too rigid and present static views, so they often fall short in providing the actionable insights you need to make informed decisions,” says Teppei Shimomori, NTT DATA, Inc.’s head of business engagement and IT portfolio management. “We wanted to shrink the time to market for solution development, and we wanted to leverage our data more optimally so functions including HR, sales, and marketing could mine data at speed and scale.”

That vital gap—between potential and the reality of current mainstream approaches—kickstarted a shift in NTT DATA's strategy. The company turned to AI agents to reduce friction, accelerate decision making, and deliver insights tailored to the needs of a wider range of users across practices.

It was the start of a new approach to interacting with enterprise data and empowering the organization to create and use domain-specific data agents that function as data experts—in other words, to take advantage of self-service data insight engines.

“We started off with simple chatbots, but with Azure AI Agent Service, we understand and use data more effectively, helping our autonomous agents perform better.”

Maureen Tan, Head of the AI Center of Excellence within NTT DATA’s CIO Office, NTT DATA

Fewer dashboards, more insights: Evolving to data-driven agents and decisions

NTT DATA turned to Microsoft’s data and AI platforms—specifically Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Foundry. The advantages of integrating Fabric with Azure AI Agent Service (a product in Azure AI Foundry) were quickly obvious: the combination produced a powerful way to build intelligent, autonomous agent systems that deliver real-time, role-specific insights and act on enterprise data.

The goal wasn’t just to modernize dashboards—it was to entirely rethink how to interact with data, upleveling autonomy. "We started off with simple chatbots, but with Azure AI Agent Service, we understand and use data more effectively, helping our autonomous agents perform better," says Tan.

Using Microsoft Fabric data agents, NTT DATA has built conversational agents capable of querying enterprise data in natural language. The results are relevant insights and recommended next steps that are tailored to each user’s role and function.

"Microsoft Fabric data agents form the conversational layer. Using Fabric and Azure AI Agent Service, we've built agents that allow us to talk to our data, ask personalized questions, and uncover insights based on role or function." Tan explains.

Under the hood, NTT DATA used Fabric data agents as data domain experts and employed an agile methodology to accelerate deployment and prove value quickly. The teams worked iteratively, launching proof-of-concept projects and continuously refining performance based on real-world usage.

One of the earliest and most productive deployments was in the company’s HR operations. Using Fabric, NTT DATA analyzed systems tracking workforce labor data.

These data sources powered a suite of HR-focused agents, helping users interact directly with real-time data to uncover patterns in staffing, chargeability, and productivity. In parallel, back-office functions were enhanced with similar agents that monitor key performance indicators and surface operational inefficiencies.

But NTT DATA didn’t stop at insights—they wanted action.

"We firmly believe in the power of data-driven decisions. It is more than creating dashboards or reporting; the integration of Azure AI Agent Service and Microsoft Fabric helps us unlock the full potential of our data to generate insights and drive real value," says Shimomori.

To move from passive reporting to proactive automation, the company embraced Azure AI Agent Service, now integrated with Fabric data agents. This integration made it possible to build intelligent agents that not only understand and reason over unstructured data, but also to plan and execute tasks using structured and semantic data from across the lake house. By leveraging these capabilities, NTT DATA began creating systems that work autonomously to retrieve relevant information, take appropriate action, and adapt to real-time scenarios.

Crucially, these solutions integrated natively with tools the company was already using. With Fabric, NTT DATA connected its enterprise data estate in OneLake, while Azure AI Foundry offered seamless interoperability across business units and technical teams. That tight integration accelerated time to value and reduced the friction of onboarding new users.

"We really like the ability to quickly design and deploy enterprise-grade AI agents with a user-friendly interface and Microsoft's comprehensive toolset, including pre-built tools for advanced data analysis as retrieval-automated generation (RAG),” says Tan.

NTT DATA is also developing an AI-powered sales coach, a multi-agent tool that prepares reps for meetings, drafts proposals, and uncovers client-specific insights—all using secure, enterprise-grounded data.

The team continues to explore new approaches with multi-agent frameworks like Semantic Kernel and AutoGen, extending AI further into the core of its business.

By embedding AI into business processes—not just apps—NTT DATA is showing how organizations can move from passive data consumption to proactive decision-making. And it’s doing it with tools that feel intuitive for users at every level.

“Microsoft Fabric data agents form the conversational layer. Using Fabric and Azure AI Agent Service we've built agents that allow us to talk to our data, ask personalized questions, and uncover insights based on role or function.”

Maureen Tan, Head of AI Center of Excellence within NTT DATA’s CIO Office, NTT DATA

Faster. Better. Easier. A simplified, high performing agentic framework

NTT DATA's initial outcomes have proven both directionally and operationally successful. Combining conversational access to data with intelligent automation, the company is transforming how teams work, how decisions are made, and informing the value of AI agents to the enterprise and its clients. The company, in essence, is client zero in proving the efficacy of solutions it takes to market.

Efficiency is the big outcome. "We can scale data products quickly and safely, even for non-technical users," says Tan.

"Microsoft Fabric helped us eclipse previous state-of-the-art solutions and achieve greater insights, faster decision making and scalable data-driven operations. We're focusing on outcomes and agility to generate demonstrable and rapid value," she added. Currently, time to market is at least 50% faster, and the new solutions have analysis and insights to make decisions that dashboards alone lacked.

“Microsoft Fabric helped us eclipse previous state-of-the-art solutions and achieve greater insights, faster decision making and scalable data-driven operations. We're focusing on outcomes and agility to generate demonstrable and rapid value.”

Maureen Tan, Head of the AI Center of Excellence within NTT DATA’s CIO Office, NTT DATA

"The beauty of it—all in a unified structure—allows us to scale faster, better, and most importantly, easier," says Tan, adding "speed is everything."

Integrating Fabric data agents with Azure AI Agent Service has reduced friction across the enterprise, from development and deployment to adoption and governance.

With AI now embedded across HR, operations, and sales workflows, the company is measuring higher productivity, better alignment, and a stronger return on its data investments. "Everyone already knows AI is powerful,” Tan says. “Agentic AI—more specifically, in this instance, Azure AI and Fabric—can elevate business outcomes as well as human performance.”

As the framework expands, the company expects to see significant opportunity for compound ROI from the aggregated efforts and outcomes. This productive new approach gives NTT DATA the flexibility, scalability, and advanced multi-agent patterns that can enhance enterprise-wide productivity and profitability in even the most complex scenarios.

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