AI business applications may soon become less visible to their users.
TekStack co-founder Marc DiGiorgio sees routine CRM and professional services work moving away from traditional interfaces. He expects more of it to happen automatically or through chat.
“I would predict that within a couple of quarters, 90% of the simple use cases that our software does will either be handled autonomously or be done in (…) a chat-like experience,” DiGiorgio told PartnerTalks host Rick McCutcheon.
DiGiorgio has spent more than two decades in the Microsoft Partner ecosystem. Earlier in his career, he helped build and run JustFoodERP, a vertical Dynamics NAV business. JustFoodERP became part of Aptean following its acquisition of IndustryBuilt in 2018. Later, DiGiorgio co-founded TekStack with James Patterson.
DiGiorgio expects users to spend less time opening records, navigating forms and manually updating fields. Instead, users could work in Microsoft Teams, Outlook, or an AI assistant while the underlying business system handles the transaction.
AI business applications move into Teams and chat
DiGiorgio used project management to illustrate the changes he sees coming.
After a customer status meeting, a project manager might normally record notes, update risks and action items, change dates, adjust resources or revise the project plan. TekStack uses meeting recaps to automate portions of that work and update the underlying project record.
Similarly, a seller might normally find an opportunity, open it and change the close date. DiGiorgio said the seller could instead instruct the system to make the update.
“You can actually just talk to a system and do that,” he said.
Dataverse now exposes a Model Context Protocol server that can connect AI clients to business data. Microsoft documents tools for searching data and creating, updating or deleting records through those connections.
PartnerTalks has examined this shift through frontline AI. Vendors are increasingly moving AI closer to specific work instead of treating it as a separate destination.
Dataverse stays underneath the experience
However, DiGiorgio does not expect the system of record to disappear as the interface changes.
TekStack is built on Microsoft Dataverse and integrates with Microsoft 365. The current TekStack platform spans CRM, professional services automation, billing, support and customer success. As a result, the data and workflows can remain connected through one underlying environment.
This architecture remains essential because AI business applications still need structured data, permissions and business logic behind the conversational layer. Microsoft’s Dataverse Web API uses the OData v4 standard. Microsoft Graph, meanwhile, provides access to Microsoft 365 services including Outlook and Teams.
Instead of beginning with the screens users need, Partners may increasingly start with the work that needs to be done. They can decide autonomously what should happen, what requires approval, and where a user should interact with the process.
DiGiorgio’s forecast is aggressive, but the underlying technology is already moving in that direction.
