Rethinking cloud gateways for apps, AI, APIs, and more in Azure with F5 in Microsoft Marketplace
In this guest blog post, Ilya Krutov, Senior Product Marketing Manager at F5, considers the evolution of cloud architectures and how F5 NGINXaaS for Azure in Microsoft Marketplace unifies delivery, security, and governance, helping platform teams avoid building yet another siloed control plane for AI.Discover how AI-powered agents on Microsoft Fabric are accelerating retail merchandising decisions
Retail organizations are under increasing pressure to move faster and make smarter, data-driven decisions at scale. In this latest Marketplace Partner Spotlight, Microsoft highlights how AI agents built on Microsoft Fabric are helping merchandising teams transform complex operational data into actionable insights—without leaving the security of their existing data environment. By leveraging Microsoft Fabric and OneLake as a unified data foundation, partners like Lucid Data Hub are enabling retailers to automate time-intensive reporting processes and shift toward continuous, insight-driven workflows. These business-ready AI agents can analyze large volumes of sales and operational data, surface meaningful trends, and deliver clear recommendations—empowering buyers and store leaders to act faster and with greater confidence. The impact is tangible: merchandising teams can reduce hours of manual analysis into minutes, uncover item-level performance insights, and identify opportunities across store clusters to optimize outcomes. If you’re exploring how AI agents, Microsoft Fabric, and the Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem can drive intelligent automation in retail, this article offers practical insights and real-world examples to help you get started. 👉 Read the full article AI agents on Microsoft Fabric for faster retail merchandising decisionsAI agents on Microsoft Fabric for faster retail merchandising decisions
For our latest in the Partner Spotlight series, we’re highlighting a partner building business-ready AI agents on Microsoft Fabric, so organizations can turn governed enterprise data into faster decisions and automated workflows. I connected with the team at Lucid Data Hub to learn how Lucid Agents Hub brings agentic experiences directly to customers’ data in OneLake, helping retail teams move beyond manual reporting and into repeatable, insight-driven action. About Venu Amancha, Founder & CEO, Lucid Data Hub builds business-ready AI agents that run directly on enterprise data within Microsoft Fabric. Our platform, Lucid Agents Hub, enables organizations to move beyond reporting and into automated, insight-driven workflows without moving data outside their existing security boundaries. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ [JR] Who is your solution designed for, and what does it help them do? [VA] Lucid Agents Hub is designed for teams who need to make frequent, high-impact decisions from large volumes of operational data especially merchandising teams, buyers, and store operations leaders in retail. Instead of spending hours assembling recaps and interpreting dashboards, they can receive agent-generated insights and clear, actionable recommendations on a predictable cadence. The AI agent eliminated that manual cycle entirely. It now surfaces those insights automatically, every week, in minutes. One example is our Retail Sales Performance AI Agent, which automates the weekly sales insights cycle for merchandising teams and buyers by analyzing millions of rows of weekly sales, item, and store data across banners and store clusters. [JR] Can you give an example of how the Retail Sales Performance AI Agent solved a customer’s problem? [VA] At Heritage Grocers Group, merchandising teams spent 5+ hours every week manually building sales recaps. They could see what happened—but not why. Buyers lacked a clear view of category trends, item-level performance, quantity shifts, and store-cluster patterns. The Retail Sales Performance AI Agent eliminated that manual cycle. It now surfaces those insights automatically every week in minutes detecting item-level declines, identifying fast-moving margin-positive SKUs, flagging underperforming items by store cluster, and delivering recommendations directly to buyers and store managers. [JR] Which Microsoft technologies or services are foundational to what you’re building? [VA] The solution runs natively on Microsoft Fabric, using OneLake as the unified data layer. Our agents operate directly on enterprise data and inherit existing governance and access controls without additional configuration. Outputs flow into the dashboards, collaboration platforms, and reporting workflows customers already use, so insights show up where decisions get made. Microsoft Fabric was a deliberate choice, not just a default. Our enterprise customers especially in retail already have their critical data living in the Microsoft ecosystem. OneLake means there’s a single, governed copy of that data. No duplication, no movement, no additional risk surface. Our agents read directly from that layer, which means the security and compliance boundaries that customers have already invested in carry over automatically. The value of building on Fabric goes beyond the technical architecture. It fundamentally changes how enterprise buyers evaluate and procure a solution like ours. When IT and security teams see that agents operate entirely within their existing Fabric environment with role-based access controls, workspace permissions, and audit logs they already control. It removes the largest barrier to enterprise adoption: trust. Procurement conversations that used to require months of security review cycles are now dramatically faster. What we didn’t fully anticipate was how much Fabric’s native integration capabilities would simplify end-to-end delivery. Going in, we expected to spend significant engineering time on data pipeline infrastructure. What we found instead was that Fabric’s data ingestion, lakehouse, and compute layers fit together in a way that let our team focus almost entirely on agent logic and business outcomes, not infrastructure plumbing. That shift in where we spend our effort has meaningfully accelerated how quickly we can deploy for new customers and extend to new use cases. [JR] How are you using AI today in Lucid Agents Hub, and what business outcomes have customers seen? [VA] We use Microsoft Azure AI Foundry for core AI and language model capabilities, and Microsoft Fabric Copilot (Fabric IQ) as the data and compute backbone. Together, they power agents that analyze weekly sales data across banners and store clusters, generate narrative-quality insights at the category and SKU level, and deliver clear recommendations without human intervention in the analysis cycle. 5+ hours of weekly manual effort eliminated Item-level sales declines and fast-moving margin-positive SKUs surfaced automatically Top-growth categories and underperforming items identified by store cluster Recommendations delivered directly to buyers and store managers weekly This all leads to faster decisions, stronger merchandising actions, and measurable improvements in product mix, availability, and overall sales performance. [JR] Any architectural decisions or best practices you’d recommend to other partners building agents? How did you approach building securely? [VA] We designed the solution as a coordinated set of specialized agents one for data ingestion, one for validation, and one for insight generation and delivery. Each agent owns a focused task, and together they run as a connected, end-to-end workflow. This makes the system easier to maintain, consistent in its logic, and straightforward to extend to new banners, categories, or use cases. Agents run entirely within the customer’s Microsoft Fabric environment data never leaves the customer’s security perimeter. All access controls, role-based permissions, and governance policies are inherited directly from Fabric. [JR] What motivated you to publish on Microsoft Marketplace? And did you use any Microsoft tools or benefits to support your publishing process? [VA] Publishing on Microsoft Marketplace was a straightforward decision. It gives enterprise customers immediate confidence that they’re procuring from a trusted, Microsoft-validated source instead of navigating a separate vendor relationship. It also simplifies procurement transactions run through an established Microsoft channel; so, customers can move faster than in traditional sales cycles. And it expands our reach to buyers already operating in the Microsoft ecosystem who actively look to Marketplace for solutions. We actively use Marketplace Rewards, which has been valuable for amplifying go-to-market efforts and accessing Microsoft co-marketing resources. We also leverage AI-enabled Marketplace Listing Optimization and related Marketplace content guidance provided through Marketplace Rewards. We used this support primarily to improve our marketplace messaging, positioning, and listing content so it would better resonate with enterprise buyers evaluating solutions within the Microsoft ecosystem. [JR] What key takeaways would you share with other partners building and publishing agents? Any unexpected wins or challenges along the way? [VA] Building and publishing agents can be a complicated endeavor. To other partners, we’d say, start with workflows that are repetitive and directly tied to decisions weekly merchandising recaps are a perfect example. Think end-to-end, not task by task. And build on governed enterprise data from the start, because that’s what drives trust and adoption. An unexpected win was how quickly merchandising teams adapted. Receiving plain-language summaries broken down by banner, store cluster, category, and SKU was more accessible than navigating dashboards. Teams made faster, more confident decisions without needing to interpret raw data themselves. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Closing reflection Lucid Data Hub shows how agents built on Microsoft Fabric can turn governed enterprise data into repeatable, decision-ready insight helping teams act faster while keeping security boundaries and access controls intact.
