What Lovable, Microsoft, and a little curiosity taught me about the next opportunity for Microsoft business applications.
I’m not a developer. I don’t write code. But in the last three weeks, I’ve built three applications for BCS using Lovable. Not prototypes or concepts I’m hoping someone will eventually build. Applications designed around real problems in our business.
- A forecasting tool that brings together Business Central timesheet actuals and committed pipeline from Dynamics 365 Sales.
- A sales application that works alongside Dynamics 365 Sales to solve a gap in how our sales team actually operates.
- A Microsoft licensing quoting tool that takes a list of Microsoft SKUs and turns it into a product order using current pricing.
Three applications in three weeks. And before my Microsoft friends start panicking, the applications I’ve built work alongside our existing Microsoft systems and help us get more value out of them. And, building these applications has made me reconsider how we approach solving business problems for customers.
Have we made small business problems too expensive to solve?
For years, I’ve watched companies spend an extraordinary amount of time and money working around their own technology. The ERP does 95% of what they need, but the remaining 5% lives in a spreadsheet. The CRM has all the right data, but the sales team still has a separate process because the system doesn’t quite fit how they work. And when someone asks whether we can fix it, the answer is usually some version of: Of course we can. Here’s the scope, timeline, and budget.
Suddenly, a relatively small business problem becomes a six-month technology initiative. So what happens? They keep the spreadsheet. I’ve seen this play out countless times, and I suspect most of you have too. But I think the economics of solving these problems are about to change.
The people who know the problem can help build the solution
Here’s what I find so exciting about tools like Lovable. The person who understands the business problem doesn’t have to rely entirely on someone else to translate it into software.
Your controller knows exactly what information is missing from their financial reporting. Your sales leader knows which five clicks in the CRM are driving their team crazy. Your operations manager knows which spreadsheet is holding together a process that should have been automated years ago. These people have always known what needed to be built. They just couldn’t build it themselves.
Now, with AI-assisted development, they can take a much more active role in creating the solution. I’m not suggesting everyone suddenly becomes a software engineer, and I’m certainly not suggesting we don’t need developers anymore. But I do think we’re entering a world where understanding a business problem becomes just as important as the technical ability to solve it.
For companies in the mid-market, where every investment has to compete for time, money, and resources, that creates an opportunity to solve problems that previously weren’t worth the cost of custom development.
Microsoft is still the foundation.
At BCS, our business runs on Microsoft. We implement Microsoft technology for our clients. I’m not interested in replacing that foundation.
Business Central and Dynamics 365 are where our core business data and processes live. Microsoft gives us the enterprise capabilities, identity infrastructure, and ecosystem that make those systems valuable. What Lovable has given me is the ability to build something very specific around those systems, incredibly quickly.
- I don’t need to replace our CRM to improve how our sales team uses it.
- I don’t need to replace Business Central to build a better forecasting experience.
- And I don’t need to buy another large software platform to solve a relatively narrow business problem.
I can build the experience we actually need while keeping our existing systems at the center. That’s the opportunity I think more Microsoft customers should be paying attention to, particularly those with processes that work well enough to get by but could work considerably better.
Building an app is only part of the job
Security. Permissions. Governance.
I know. Not nearly as fun as building three apps in three weeks, but this is where I think we need to be careful.
Just because you can build an application in an afternoon doesn’t mean you should deploy it to your entire company that afternoon.
There’s a difference between authenticating a user and actually securing an application. Who can sign in? What information should they be able to see? What are they allowed to change? How is that access enforced? These are not questions you get to skip because AI helped you build the application.
Microsoft Entra ID, while an excellent foundation for identity, doesn’t automatically solve application-level permissions. This is also why I believe developers, experienced consultants, and centers of excellence become more important in this new world, not less.
Their role evolves. Instead of being the bottleneck through which every idea must pass, they help establish the architecture, standards, and guardrails that allow the rest of the business to build responsibly. The goal shouldn’t be to prevent people from building things. It should be to make it safe for more people to do so.
For companies that want more control over where these applications run, there’s another important piece of the equation. Lovable can sync application code to GitHub, giving technical teams a path to deploy and manage that code within their own Azure environment, with the appropriate hosting, configuration, security, and release processes. Building an app and operating it responsibly are two different things, and both matter.
What this means for the mid-market
I think we’re going to see a shift in how businesses think about custom applications. Historically, companies had to choose between adapting their processes to the software they purchased or investing in custom development to make the software fit their business.
Increasingly, there’s a third option. Keep the enterprise platform, with the data and core processes where they belong, and build focused applications around the workflows that make your business unique.
Start small. Solve a real problem. Put it in front of the people doing the work, improve it, and do it with the right technical oversight. The opportunity isn’t to build hundreds of random apps that nobody governs or maintains. It’s to reduce the cost and effort of solving business problems enough that companies can finally address things they’ve been working around for years.
Where partners like BCS fit
I don’t think the future of consulting is simply implementing another system or writing another statement of work. I think it’s helping customers get more value out of the technology they already own.
Sometimes that’s a traditional Business Central or Dynamics 365 implementation. Sometimes it’s process improvement, automation, or AI agents. And sometimes it’s helping a customer build a small, purpose-built application that solves a problem they’ve been living with for a decade.
Microsoft provides the foundation. Tools like Lovable make it easier to build. And experienced partners help connect the two in a way that’s secure, sustainable, and useful.
Three weeks ago, I hadn’t built any of these applications. Today, I’m already thinking about the next three. And if I can do that without being a developer, imagine what the people who know your business best could build.
That’s the part I’m most excited about.
If you’re running Business Central or Dynamics 365 and have a workflow your team has been working around for years, I’d genuinely love to hear about it. Those are exactly the problems I think we should be solving next.
