What it is
An Operations Agent is the "do something" sibling to the "answer questions" Data Agent. Both live in Fabric IQ. The Operations Agent uses an ontology to reason about live business events, and emits actions: trigger a flow, draft a purchase order, escalate an alert, update an ERP record.
vs Data Agents
Two different roles in the agentic stack:
- Data Agent — reactive Q&A. Answers questions about data the user already cares about.
- Operations Agent — proactive automation. Watches streams continuously and acts when rules are met.
Most production Fabric AI estates use both: a Data Agent for "What happened?" and an Operations Agent for "Do something about it."
Anatomy of an agent
- Ontology binding — the agent uses your Fabric IQ ontology to interpret events. "Order" means something specific in your business; the ontology tells the agent.
- Event sources — Eventstreams, KQL queries, or scheduled triggers feeding the agent.
- Rules & objectives — declarative conditions the agent reasons over.
- Action surfaces — Activator, Power Automate, Teams, custom webhooks.
- Human-in-the-loop — for high-impact actions, route to a Teams approval card before execution.
Production patterns
- Stockout response (retail) — agent monitors inventory; drafts PO; Teams approval; ERP write.
- Service incident triage (B2B SaaS) — agent watches error rates by tenant; opens Jira; escalates by severity.
- Demand surge response (utilities) — sensor stream; agent recommends load shedding; human approves; grid action.
Best practices
- Start with recommendations, not actions. First quarter: agent proposes; humans execute. Second quarter: graduate selected paths to autonomous.
- Ontology first. An agent without an ontology guesses at terminology. Don't deploy until your ontology is curated.
- Audit every action. Log inputs, rule fired, action taken, outcome. Necessary for debugging and for compliance.
- Bound the blast radius. Per-agent action quotas; per-tenant rate limits; manual override.
Common pitfalls
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Granting an autonomous agent broad write permissions. Start with read access and approval workflows. Earn autonomy through track record.
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Bypassing the ontology to "ship faster." Without semantic grounding, the agent acts on signals it doesn't understand. The cleanup is worse than the delay.