From Excel to Fabric with AI Agents: Automating Migration with MCP Servers

For decades, spreadsheets have powered the business world. From financial models to risk analysis, Excel's flexibility has made it the go-to tool for countless critical processes. But this has created a problem: valuable data and business logic locked away in files, maintained through manual, siloed workflows that are difficult to scale, govern, or share.

Microsoft Fabric promises to change this—bringing your data into a unified platform where it can be structured, secured, and reused across any tool. But there's a challenge: migrating complex Excel models to Power BI and Fabric is time-consuming, technically demanding, and risky. How do you preserve intricate business logic? How do you maintain control whilst automating the heavy lifting?

Enter the Model Context Protocol (MCP) - the breakthrough that connects AI agents to Power BI and Fabric. These open-standard servers enable AI assistants like Claude to automate your migration: reading Excel structures, generating Power Query transformations, designing and building lakehouses, notebooks, semantic models, DAX measures and visualisations. And validating the entire workflow through natural language conversation.

The AI does the grunt work while you maintain oversight at every critical decision point.

In this session, we'll take a credit risk financial model and migrate it to Fabric using AI agents powered by Power BI and Fabric MCP servers.

You'll see:
• How to configure MCP servers with Claude Desktop or VS Code for seamless Power BI/Fabric integration
• Using "context engineering" to guide AI agents through your specific business requirements and data structures
• Live automation of the migration workflow—from Excel analysis through Power Query generation, lakehouse/notebook and semantic model design/build (Including DAX measure creation)
• Implementing validation checkpoints and rollback strategies to maintain quality and control
• Practical patterns for accelerating future migrations while preserving business logic

Attendees will leave with configuration templates, starter prompts, and a framework for leveraging AI to transform weeks-long migration projects into hours—without sacrificing quality, control, or the deep business knowledge embedded in Excel models.

Configure MCP servers to enable AI agents to read, create, and modify Excel files, Power BI semantic models and Fabric artifacts programmatically. Use AI-assisted workflows to compress weeks-long Excel migrations into hours while preserving complex business logic. Implement validation strategies to ensure AI-generated transformations match source Excel calculations with acceptable tolerance.