Sabancı Holding unifies data with Microsoft Fabric and accelerates decision-making with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Sabancı Holding is one of Turkey’s leading conglomerates, operating in 17 countries with 60,000 employees across banking, energy, financial services, industrials, materials, and retail. The holding company invests in subsidiaries, sets strategic direction, and monitors performance to guide decision-making.

To do this effectively, the holding required access to high-quality data about the performance of its subsidiaries—what’s working, what isn’t, and whether there’s a need to increase support, shift investments, or reconsider its strategy. “This is no small task, especially given the wide variety of sectors we operate in,” explains Metin Demirel, Digital Holding Program Director at Sabancı Holding. “Each industry has its own market dynamics, standards, and timelines.”

Scattered processes slowing efficiency and insights

Previously, Sabancı Holding relied on Excel-based data collection and analysis across its group companies. This fragmented approach resulted in delays, duplication, and limited transparency into overall performance. “Different teams worked from different data sets, making alignment difficult,” says Demirel. “By the time teams finished consolidating everything, there was little time left for real analysis or generating insights.” Teams operated independently with their own spreadsheets and workflows, making collaboration difficult and creating knowledge gaps. “When someone left, it could take weeks—or even months—for a new team member to understand or rebuild the process. Legacy tools were often avoided, increasing the burden on others,” Demirel explains.

In addition, these spreadsheet-based reports lacked the structure and consistency required for AI-driven analysis—making it nearly impossible to automate insights or scale data intelligence across the organization. Continuing with this approach posed a growing risk to agility, accuracy, and informed decision-making at the enterprise level.

AI-powered data driving maximum value creation

Sabancı Holding realized that the most efficient way to streamline its operations and unlock the potential of data was to consolidate it onto a single platform. “We explored our options and realized that Microsoft Fabric was the most mature analytics platform,” Demirel shares. “Microsoft Fabric fit our purposes—it offered easy integration across our group companies, compatibility with Power BI for visualization, and unlocked AI capabilities through Fabric Copilot.”

Still, driving adoption wasn’t an easy task. Many of Sabancı Holding employees were seasoned Excel users, and the benefits of Fabric and Microsoft 365 Copilot weren’t immediately obvious. “It was a catch-22: eventually, they’d save time using the new tools, but needed time to learn them first,” elaborates Demirel. To lead the change, Sabancı Holding rallied its digital leaders. Once leadership experienced the benefits of Fabric firsthand, they championed it across the organization. “Now, people are coming to us with new ideas and it’s triggering a cultural shift across the organization,” Demirel adds. 

Centralized, connected, collaborative data

Within four months, Sabancı Holding deployed Microsoft Fabric and reached 30% adoption. “All data from our group companies is now consolidated into a unified environment—Microsoft Fabric,” explains Demirel. Raw data is stored in Fabric Lakehouse, processed into Fabric Warehouse, and visualized through Power BI dashboards. The result: a shared, structured foundation for insights available to all employees across Sabancı Holding. 

With this centralized setup in place, Sabancı Holding introduced Copilot in Microsoft Fabric to accelerate data analysis. Today, strategy departments use Copilot to speed up market research, accessing broader and deeper data in far less time. "When we receive financial data from subsidiaries, AI can help analyze it quickly,” adds Demirel. “Our employees then step in to go deeper, interpret results, and make strategic decisions. AI handles the groundwork; people do the thinking.”

As adoption expanded beyond the Holding team, subsidiaries across the group began embracing the tools as well. “Currently, Sabancı Holding employees are using Power BI and Copilot in Microsoft Fabric for insights into financial, sales, and operational performance,” shares Demirel.

With a unified, traceable system, teams now work from the same source of truth, making faster, more confident decisions. Automatic real-time updates of the data flow across all companies also improved data accuracy, helping Sabancı Holding react faster. 

The foundation for scalable, AI-powered innovation

With a clean data structure in place, Sabancı Holding is already moving toward more advanced AI-powered capabilities across the organization. “We’ve implemented the Sabancı Holding AI Agent that orchestrates the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process once data is received from subsidiaries.” says Demirel. Built using Azure OpenAI Service, this AI-powered agent is just the beginning. 

Sabancı Holding’s next step is building AI Agents for each company to interact with the holding’s central AI Agent, automating all ETL processes. “This wasn’t part of our original roadmap,” admits Demirel.  “We started with a simple goal: a data warehouse for analytics. But AI technology is advancing quickly, and Microsoft is releasing new capabilities almost every month, so it’s very exciting to be developing this project when new opportunities present themselves every day.”

With the AI Agent network underway, Sabancı Holding’s future plans are even more ambitious, envisioning an AI Co-Executive for all board members. The vision is to offer executives direct, conversational access to insight with no need for dashboards or waiting. “That’s why we chose Microsoft. Whenever it releases new features or tools, we’ll benefit from those improvements. Their scalable cloud services give us the tools to future-proof our businesses,” concludes Demirel.

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