A Microsoft shop that partnered with Lovable
Lately, one question keeps coming up from our own team and from the people we work with: why would Hummingbird partner with Lovable?
It's a fair question. We're a Microsoft shop, through and through. Our business runs on Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, Copilot, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, and Azure AI. That's where our expertise lives, and it's where our clients trust us to lead.
So, on the surface, adding Lovable to the picture can look like a detour. It isn't. It's the result of a lesson we learned the hard way, by running our own business on AI.
The gap we didn't see coming
Our first wave of AI work was about access. We connected agents and copilots to our business data so our teams could ask better questions about customers, projects, staffing, delivery, and operations, and get answers faster.
It worked. People found what they needed in seconds instead of hours.
But as Hummingbird grew, we noticed something we hadn't expected. Getting answers was no longer the hard part. The hard part was helping teams work together around those answers.
Leaders don't make decisions alone. Teams make decisions together. And a team needs more than one-on-one conversation with an AI assistant. It needs a shared context: a common view of the same information, the same priorities, and the same next steps.
When prototypes became production
We first brought Lovable in for mockups, prototypes, and experimentation. It was a sandbox, a fast way to sketch an idea and see whether it was held up.
Then something unexpected happened. The prototypes became production applications. Many were built in days and deployed in weeks, not the months or years we were used to.
What surprised me most, though, wasn't the speed. It was who was doing the building. Very often, it was the people living the problem every day: our CEO, our sales leaders, our delivery leaders, and me.
Instead of writing up requirements, dropping them into a backlog, and hoping someone eventually got to them, the people closest to the business could shape the solution directly. The distance between "here's what we need" and "here's what we're using" shrank dramatically.
Focused experiences on a foundation we already trusted
That shift changed how we think about software. We stopped trying to build one big application that does everything for everyone. Instead, we started building focused experiences for specific people, specific processes, and specific decisions.
Today, a handful of these applications help run Hummingbird:
Planner
Fire Watch
Skill Search
Growth Compass
Interview Tracker
Here's the part that matters most: the data never moved, and our Microsoft strategy didn't change. Everything still sits on the systems and data we already trust.
What changed was our ability to create experiences around those systems. That's why we partnered with Lovable. Not because we wanted less Microsoft, but because we wanted to unlock more value from the Microsoft investments we'd already made.
Where enterprise software is heading
For Greg Gant and me, the lesson was simple. The challenge was never getting answers. The challenge was helping our teams act on them.
That lesson has fundamentally changed how we see the future of software. It's also why we're building a new capability at Hummingbird focused on Adaptive Experiences:
Focused business applications
Built by the people closest to the problem
Connected to trusted enterprise data
Delivered in days and weeks instead of months and years
We believe that's where enterprise software is going. AI gets people to the answer. Adaptive experiences help teams do something with it, together.
If you're exploring how AI, Lovable, Copilot Managed Runtime, and adaptive experiences fit together, I'd love to compare notes. Reach out to the Hummingbird team or me, and let's talk about what this could look like in your organization.