Is Your IT Consultant Advising You or Just Repeating Microsoft?

It's 2009. You're in a requirements meeting for a new SharePoint deployment. The consultant across the table has one answer for everything: InfoPath. Employee onboarding? InfoPath. Expense approvals? InfoPath. Complex multi-step workflows with business logic that has no business living in a form layer? InfoPath. They're certified, they're confident, and they're wrong about where this is going.

Fast forward sixteen years. Different consultant, maybe. Different product names, definitely. Same dynamic. Power Automate for everything. Copilot bolted onto every workflow. The recommendation always happens to match whatever Microsoft announced at Ignite last November.

You seeing this? Because it's the same movie with a different cast.

What went wrong with the InfoPath era?

InfoPath wasn't a bad product. It solved a real problem — form-driven data capture inside SharePoint — and for straightforward use cases, it worked fine. The disaster wasn't InfoPath itself. The disaster was consultants who didn't understand its limits and didn't care to learn them.

The pattern was predictable. A client needed a business process automated. The consultant reached for InfoPath because that's what they knew, what they were certified in, and what Microsoft was pushing. Simple forms worked. Then the requirements got more complex — conditional logic, cross-site data lookups, integration with external systems — and instead of stepping back and choosing the right tool, the consultant doubled down.

C# code-behinds deployed as farm solutions. Business logic baked into form layers that were never designed to hold it. XML schemas stretched past recognition. Every workaround made the next problem harder and the eventual migration more expensive.

The cleaner path was sitting right there the entire time. Standard APIs. Cross-site REST calls within SharePoint pages. Server-side logic in proper web services. Architecture that was portable, maintainable, and didn't treat a form designer as an application platform. But that path required the consultant to say "InfoPath isn't the right tool for this part," and that sentence never came — because their entire practice was built around InfoPath being the right tool for everything.

When Microsoft announced InfoPath's deprecation, those clients were stuck with deeply entangled systems that couldn't migrate cleanly to anything. The consultant had moved on to the next engagement. The bill landed on the client.

Why do consultants follow the vendor playbook?

This isn't a mystery. The incentive structure makes it almost inevitable.

Microsoft partner programs reward adoption. Certifications are product-specific. The consulting firm's pipeline depends on being positioned as the go-to for whatever Microsoft is currently promoting. A consultant who tells a client "you don't need Power Automate for this — a lightweight Azure Function would be simpler and cheaper to maintain" is a consultant whose firm doesn't get credit for Power Automate adoption metrics.

The certification treadmill makes it worse. A consultant who invested months getting certified in Power Platform has a professional incentive to recommend Power Platform regardless of fit. That's not corruption — it's the gravitational pull of specialization without breadth. When your only credential is a hammer, the entire world looks like it needs nailing.

There's also a knowledge problem. Recommending the right tool for a specific situation requires understanding multiple tools and their tradeoffs. That's harder than knowing one stack deeply. The consultant who can say "Power Automate is wrong here, use this instead" has to actually know what "this instead" looks like, how to architect it, and how to support it. Most consultants don't have that range. So they recommend what they know, call it best practice, and move on.

None of this is unique to Microsoft. Salesforce consultants recommend Salesforce. AWS consultants recommend AWS. But the Microsoft ecosystem is especially prone to it because the product surface is so broad — Microsoft has a product for nearly everything, which means a Microsoft-aligned consultant can plausibly recommend staying in-ecosystem for any requirement. "Why go outside M365 when Power Platform can do it?" sounds reasonable until you're three years in with a Power Automate workflow that takes forty-five seconds to trigger and can't be debugged without opening four browser tabs.

What does the 2026 version of this problem look like?

Power Automate is today's InfoPath. Not because it's a bad product — it handles simple automation workflows competently. But the same pattern is playing out. Consultants are recommending it for everything, including use cases where it's a poor fit, because it's what Microsoft is pushing and what they're certified to deliver.

Copilot is the accelerant. Microsoft is embedding Copilot into every surface — Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Power Platform, Dynamics. The consultant class has pivoted overnight from "Power Platform for everything" to "Copilot for everything." The recommendation to bolt Copilot onto every workflow doesn't come from an assessment of where AI assistants add value and where they add noise. It comes from the same place the InfoPath recommendation came from: this is what Microsoft is selling, this is what we're certified in, this is what we'll propose.

The failure mode is predictable because it already happened. Copilot gets embedded into workflows where it doesn't meaningfully improve outcomes. Organizations pay for licenses they don't need across seats that don't benefit. The consultant delivers a "Copilot-enabled" solution that's really just the same solution with an AI button that nobody uses after the first week. Two years from now, when Microsoft shifts its strategy — and it will, because it always does — those organizations will be carrying integration debt from a tool that was recommended based on a vendor roadmap, not a business need.

Power Automate flows are already showing the InfoPath pattern. Complex business logic shoved into a low-code automation layer. Flows that take minutes to execute because they were designed in a drag-and-drop interface that hides the performance implications. Error handling that's nearly impossible to implement cleanly. Governance that doesn't exist because the platform was marketed as "no IT required" and IT was never brought into the loop.

This isn't speculation. These are the engagements showing up right now — organizations that went all-in on Power Platform two years ago and are starting to hit the walls that the consultant never mentioned were there.

How do you tell a real consultant from a reseller?

The test is simple and uncomfortable: has your consultant ever told you not to use a Microsoft product?

Not "use this Microsoft product instead of that Microsoft product." That's just rearranging deck chairs within the same ecosystem. The question is whether they've ever said "the right tool for this problem isn't in the Microsoft stack" — or even "you don't need a tool for this at all."

A real consultant tells you where the platform roadmap is heading and where your exposure sits. They know what Microsoft is going to deprecate before Microsoft announces it, because they've watched the investment patterns, the documentation gaps, the features that stopped getting updates two years ago. They told clients to start migrating off InfoPath in 2014, not 2019 when the deprecation notice finally landed.

A real consultant pushes back. They say "Power Automate can do this, but it shouldn't" and explain why. They say "Copilot adds value here but not there" and draw the line based on your operations, not on a licensing upsell. They have opinions that occasionally cost them the easy sale because the recommendation that's right for your organization isn't always the recommendation that's most profitable for theirs.

A reseller with a consulting rate never pushes back. Every recommendation aligns with the vendor's current push. Every architecture stays inside the ecosystem. Every problem has a solution that happens to require additional licensing. The advice sounds thoughtful, but trace it back and it always lands in the same place: buy more Microsoft.

Ask the question. If your consultant has never recommended against a Microsoft product when the situation called for it, you don't have a consultant. You have a reseller with a nicer business card.

That's the test. Apply it this quarter, before the next vendor pitch lands on your desk.