For years, we've built supplier and vendor portals around menus, forms and transactions.
Log in. Check an order. Upload a document. Submit a request. Update your information. Find a policy. Log out.
Those portals did their job. They moved paper processes online and gave external users a front door into the business. But in most cases, they digitized the transaction without really changing the experience.
With Power Pages, Power Platform and AI, there's an opportunity to rethink that model entirely, around adaptive experiences.
Instead of every supplier seeing the same portal, imagine an experience shaped by who they are, what's happening in the business, and what action they need to take next.
From static portal to agentic experience
I think about the evolution of the B2B portal in four stages:
Static portal → Personalized workspace → Adaptive experience → Agentic experience
A static portal shows everyone the same menus. A personalized workspace knows who you are. An adaptive experience responds to what's happening in the business around you. And an agentic experience goes one step further: it helps you get the work done.
Most organizations are still somewhere between the first and second stage. The opportunity is in the last two.
Build around the user, not the application
A supplier shouldn't need to understand your ERP architecture.
They shouldn't need to know which system holds the purchase order, which one holds the invoice, and which one holds the quality record. Their experience should revolve around their work, and the questions they're actually trying to answer:
What requires my attention?
Which orders have issues?
What documents am I missing?
What changed?
What approvals are waiting?
What should I do next?
A supplier doesn't need another dashboard. They need to know what needs their attention.
This is where the Microsoft stack is a strong fit. Power Pages provides the external-facing experience, with authenticated external access and role-based security. Power Platform and Dataverse provide the foundation for the data-driven workflows behind it, and Power Pages integrates with Power Automate to connect the experience to the process.
One portal doesn't have to mean one experience
Most organizations, and especially manufacturers, do business with several kinds of external partners, and each relationship looks different:
Suppliers → purchase orders, forecasts, quality issues, shipments, invoices
Vendors → onboarding, compliance, documentation, certifications
Distributors and partners → opportunities, orders, inventory, programs
Customers → orders, service, cases, warranties, documentation
Same digital foundation. But the experience, and the actions presented, can be tailored around the relationship and the process.
Shift from navigation to conversation
This is where I think it gets interesting.
Today, understanding a single issue often means clicking through five or six pages. Instead, imagine a supplier simply asking:
“What purchase orders need my attention?”
“Why is invoice 24872 on hold?”
“Show me the quality issues I need to resolve.”
“What documentation am I missing?”
Microsoft is already bringing agents into Power Pages, secured through authentication and role-based access controls. That matters, because in a B2B setting, the right answer always depends on who's asking.
Increasingly, users shouldn't need to know where the information lives at all. They should be able to ask, act and complete work through the experience.
The portal starts becoming less of a website and more of an intelligent interface into the business process.
Let context drive the next best experience
If there's one idea I'd want people to take away, it's this: the experience shouldn't just present data. It should adapt to what's happening in the business.
Here's how I'd design for that:
Normal PO → show status
Late PO → surface corrective action
Quality issue detected → prioritize the NCR and quality workflow
Missing supplier certification → surface the document request
Invoice exception → guide the vendor toward resolution
To be clear, these are examples of how I'd approach the experience design, not out-of-the-box product behavior. But the platform gives us the building blocks to make them real.
A vendor doesn't need another menu. They need the fastest path to resolving an exception.
That's the difference between digitizing a portal and digitizing the relationship.
The architecture underneath it
The business story should lead, but it helps to see how the pieces fit together:
Power Pages: the digital experience and external front door
Copilot and agents: conversational and agentic interactions
Power Platform: workflow, automation and business logic
Dataverse: contextual business data
Dynamics 365, ERP and operational systems: orders, suppliers, inventory, quality, invoices, service and more
Power Pages supports Dataverse, Power Automate integration, external authentication and responsive experiences, plus pro-developer extensibility for the moments when low-code isn't enough. The technology supports the story. It isn't the story.
From transactions to relationships
That's the shift I'm excited about: moving from B2B portals that expose transactions to adaptive experiences that orchestrate relationships.
Experience → context → action → agent.
The portal of the future isn't a destination. It's an intelligent, adaptive layer between your business and the people you do business with.
If you're rethinking how your suppliers, vendors, partners or customers work with you, that's a conversation we'd love to have at Hummingbird.