The two-camps problem
The consulting market right now sorts itself into two camps.
In the first camp are the Microsoft consultancies. Microsoft Partners, Gold Partners, Solutions Partners. They've been shipping SharePoint sites, Power Apps, Azure infrastructure, and M365 rollouts for fifteen years. They know the platform cold. What they typically don't talk about — and don't use heavily inside their own delivery — is AI tooling. The website still says “Microsoft Partner specializing in Office 365 migrations” like it's 2019.
In the second camp are the AI-native shops. Devin, Factory, Blitzy, the agentic-coding platforms. They sell speed: ship an MVP in days, automate 80% of development, let the AI do the work. They're great at greenfield JavaScript on Vercel. What they typically don't do is the Microsoft-stack work — SharePoint integrations, Power Platform extensions, Azure AD governance, anything where the answer involves the M365 admin center.
Most clients we talk to are sitting in the middle of those two camps. Their stack is Microsoft. Their ambition is to move at the pace AI-native shops promise. They want both sides at the same time.
What ACM is
ACM is a Microsoft shop that ships with Claude. Both halves of that sentence are required.
Microsoft on the build sidemeans the things we ship for clients run on the Microsoft platform when that fits the client's stack. SharePoint sites, Power Platform flows, Azure infrastructure, Entra ID, M365 add-ins. AJ Wiley brings 18+ years on the Microsoft platform. We're a Microsoft Funded Partner. We do this work fluently, and we'll tell you when the right answer isn't Microsoft — but we won't default to Vercel just because it's easier for us.
Claude on the development side means the way our engineers actually write the code is paired with AI tooling all day, every day. Claude Code, Cursor, model-context workflows. The senior engineer drives. The AI compresses the parts of the job that used to take a day into the part that takes ten minutes. Boilerplate. First drafts. Pattern translation. Test scaffolding. Documentation. Audits.
We wrote a whole post about how we use AI without shipping AI slop — short version: every line is reviewed and owned by a senior engineer. AI is the power tool. The carpenter is still in the room.
Why the combination matters
The Microsoft-only shops are slow. Not because they're bad — they're often excellent — but because they ship at the speed of unaccelerated humans. A SharePoint migration that takes 12 weeks at a traditional partner takes 4–6 weeks when senior engineers are paired with AI.
The AI-native shops are fast on the wrong stack. If your business runs on M365 and the answer to your problem is a SharePoint site with a Power Automate flow, an AI-coding platform that ships beautiful Next.js apps on Vercel isn't going to help. You'll get a separate web app that doesn't talk to anything you already own.
The combination — Microsoft stack expertise plus AI-accelerated delivery — is what most mid-market clients actually need. And, weirdly, almost nobody is selling it.
What this looks like on an engagement
We're building for Barings — a global asset manager — and the deliverables are exactly the shape you'd expect from this combination:
- SharePoint Online team sites with custom templates per investment strategy. Microsoft on the build side
- Power Platform automations replacing email threads with auditable steps. Microsoft on the build side
- Entra ID conditional access for external collaboration. Microsoft on the build side
- Every line of the underlying code written by a senior engineer paired with Claude Code. AI on the development side
That's the shape of the offer. The platform looks identical to what a traditional MS Partner would have shipped. The pace and price look more like what an AI-native shop would have promised.
The Fit Call question
If you're evaluating consultancies and your stack is Microsoft, ask the same two questions of each:
- What does your daily engineering workflow look like in 2026?If “we're experimenting with Copilot” is the most concrete answer, the team hasn't internalized AI tooling yet. You'll get 2019-pace delivery
- How comfortable are you saying no to Microsoft when the answer should be something else? A Microsoft Partner with hammer-hand syndrome will turn every problem into a SharePoint problem. The right answer is fluent across the stack but not married to it
For us the answers are: Claude Code and Cursor every day on every engagement. And about a third of our work ends up not Microsoft — typically when the client is shipping a public-facing consumer surface where Next.js + Vercel wins cleanly. The honest framing is the differentiator.
Microsoft shop that ships with Claude. Both halves required.