The Technology Is the Era. The Judgment Is the Career.

I’ve been automating the same kind of work for 25 years. The technology has changed three times. The hard part hasn’t changed once.

Era one: SharePoint workflows. Documents routed for approval, forms replacing paper. Era two: the Power Platform - flows, structured data, apps replacing the spreadsheet everyone secretly ran the department on. Era three: agents that read the submission, apply the rules, and decide what happens next.

Every era arrived with the same promise: this time the tool is smart enough that you won’t have to understand the process. Every era, that promise was wrong. The projects that believed it failed the same way across all three generations - and I know the pattern because those are the projects I get called in to salvage.

They automated the documented process instead of the real one. The real process lives in behavior: the workaround everyone uses, the checklist in the reviewer’s head, the side spreadsheet that exists because the official system doesn’t answer the actual question. Build from the binder and you automate fiction. Faster fiction, now with AI.

And they built the maximum solution instead of the right one. Some processes need an agent. Some need a flow. Some need one new field and one changed habit, and no software at all. Knowing the difference is worth more than any of the tools.

That’s the part that compounds. The platforms, I’ve rented and replaced three times. The discipline - find the real process, size the build to it - has appreciated for 25 years.

The technology is the era. The judgment is the career.