AI shows up in 33 sessions at PASS Summit West 2026, more than any other theme this year. Some of that is hands-on: writing DAX with an LLM, building agentic workflows in Fabric, wiring Copilot into your SQL development. Some of it is the harder question sitting underneath: how do you govern an AI agent once it has access to your data, and why does your existing architecture keep slowing your AI plans down.

This is the full round-up, Monday through Wednesday. Whether you’re the one building with AI day to day or the one who has to answer for how it’s governed, there’s a path through here for you.

Start With a Practice, Not Just a Prompt

Optional Pre-Conference Session: Monday, November 9

• Ginger Grant, Building an AI-Enabled Fabric Practice. This full-day session turns AI’s promised productivity gains into repeatable practice: setting up an AI-ready environment, building prompt libraries and reusable patterns, and using GitHub Actions to keep quality checks and guardrails in place so hallucinations don’t reach production.

Tuesday: Grounding and Getting Started

• Sajitha Sritharan, Stop AI Hallucinations: Grounding Agents with Fabric Semantic Models (Deep Dive). Why AI agents confidently report the wrong numbers, and how semantic models, ontologies, and agent-level guardrails fix the grounding problem. Built for data engineers, analytics leaders, and architects.
• Deborah Melkin, No Fluff, Just Facts: AI Essentials for Data Professionals (Learning Pathway, part 1). An experienced data professional sorts what’s actually useful in the AI hype cycle from what’s a distraction.
• Ginger Grant, Creating Agentic Solutions with Fabric IQ. Hands-on with Fabric IQ and Data Agents, including how to keep agents inside governed, role-based boundaries. Runs at the same time as the session above, so pick one.

Wednesday November 11: The Full Slate

Wednesday carries most of the AI program, spread across parallel tracks, so plan ahead for which sessions matter most to you.

• Taiob Ali, AI in the SQL World: Tools We Have & Tips for Using Them (Learning Pathway, part 2). Covers what it actually means to “integrate AI into your daily workflow,” including GitHub Copilot in SSMS and AI search in your database.
• Reid Havens, AI-Assisted BI (AIBI): Using LLMs to Build and Maintain Semantic Models. Real workflows for using LLMs like Claude Code and the Power BI MCP server to author DAX, document models, and enforce standards.
• Bob Ward & Naveen Prakash, An Inside Look at How Microsoft Builds SQL Features (Deep Dive). How Microsoft itself uses AI from design to code to deployment, including how they debug their own product.
• Chanpreet Singh, Architecting “Agent-Ready” Data Platforms for Multi-DB Environments (Deep Dive). Moving past basic RAG to a governed, observable foundation for autonomous agents across SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and cloud-native stores.
• Reid Havens, I Let an LLM Build My Semantic Model (Here’s What Happened) (Lightning Talk). This lightning talk hands Tabular Editor’s CLI to an LLM and reports what it got right, and what needed guardrails.
• Marcelo Fernandes, GenAI for Schema Conversion: What It Actually Gets Right (and Wrong) (Lightning Talk). An honest, tool-agnostic look at using generative AI for database code conversion.
• Tyler Garner, Governing AI Agents: Designing Skills for Control and Trust. This session defines “skills” as governed capability units, a structured way to make sure agents can’t touch more than they’re allowed to.
• Matt Gordon, Keeping Up Without Falling Down: AI’s Future for Data Professionals (Learning Pathway, part 3). Where AI takes data professionals’ jobs next, and how to prepare.
• Garett Medlin, AI Coding Agents for Power BI: From Hype to Daily Workflow. Shows what an AI-augmented Power BI workflow actually looks like in 2026, including model health checks and optimization.
• Anupama Natarajan & Bhaskar Natarajan, AI-Powered SQL Dev with VS Code and Copilot. Generating queries, refactoring stored procedures, and running CI/CD pipelines with Copilot assistance.
• Durga Prasad InduTeja Aligeti & Ankit Aryan, Building Secure Text-to-SQL Chatbots with PostgreSQL RLS. Stopping an AI chatbot from leaking data it shouldn’t see, using schema pruning, query validation, and Row-Level Security.
• Kevin Wilkie, The Architecture Gap: Why Your AI Strategy Is Slower Than You Think. Most AI initiatives stall in production. This session covers the architectural patterns that actually let AI scale.

Why This Lineup

AI at PASS Summit West splits cleanly into two conversations: what to build, and how to govern what you’ve built. Cover both, and you’re ahead of most organizations still treating AI as a bolt-on.

Register now to join us at PASS Summit West, November 9–11, 2026, in Seattle.