About 365 Cloud Advisors
Enterprise experience. Practical AI.
365 Cloud Advisors helps growing businesses navigate the intersection of AI, ERP, data and operations. Our work starts with business outcomes, then chooses the architecture, automation and governance required to reach them.
The work is grounded in how your business actually runs — the systems you already own, the processes people have built around them, and the constraints that come with both. Recommendations that ignore any of those rarely survive their first quarter.
Advice that has to survive contact with your systems.
There is no shortage of AI strategy available at the moment. Most of it is written at a level of abstraction that never has to meet a real chart of accounts, a permissions model somebody built in 2016, or an integration that only works because it runs at 3am when nothing else is touching the database.
Our work sits at the other end of that. Before we recommend anything, we want to know how your data actually moves, which processes depend on one person’s memory, and what has already been tried. That is unglamorous and it is where the answer usually is.
The result is a short, sequenced set of things worth doing, each with an honest cost attached — and an explicit list of the ones to leave alone for now.
Six things we hold to.
Outcomes before architecture
The technology decision comes second. If we cannot name the business outcome and how you would measure it, there is nothing to design yet.
We will tell you not to do it
Plenty of good AI ideas are not worth their cost, their risk or their timing. Saying so is part of the engagement, not a failure of it.
Start with what you already own
Most organizations are running well short of what their current licenses already allow. New platforms are a last resort, not an opening move.
Governance from the start
Permissions, data boundaries, retention and human oversight are design inputs. Retrofitting them after a pilot goes well is how pilots stop going well.
Your team keeps the keys
Documentation, naming conventions and handover are part of delivery. Nothing we build should require us to keep it running.
Efficient by design
Model choice, batch size and how often something runs are cost decisions and environmental ones at the same time. Smaller and less often is usually both cheaper and better.
The route we take, in order.
Assess
Understand your business, systems, processes and AI readiness.
Modernize
Strengthen ERP platforms, integrations and data foundations.
Connect
Unify trusted data and make it securely accessible to people, apps and AI.
Automate
Deploy AI agents where they deliver measurable value.
Govern
Implement responsible AI with security, permissions and human oversight.
Optimize
Improve performance, cost, accuracy and environmental impact.
The situations we see most.
Most engagements start in one of a handful of places. If any of these sound like your week, the first conversation tends to be a short one — we have seen the shape of it before.
If none of them quite fit, it is still worth asking. Some of the most useful work has started with a question that did not match any list.
Where the experience comes from.
This practice is built on close to two decades of Microsoft ERP work — as the outside consultant brought in to implement, as the in-house owner who then had to live with the result, and as the architect responsible for keeping large estates upright.
That range matters more than it sounds. Implementation partners rarely see what their design feels like in year three. Internal teams rarely see how anyone else solved the same problem. Advice that has been on both sides of that line tends to be more careful about what it promises.
We write about this work in the open. If you want to know how we think before you talk to us, the Insights archive is the honest sample.
The things people actually ask.
Do you resell software?
No. This is an advisory practice, not a reseller or an implementation shop. Where you do need a product or a delivery partner, we will help you choose one and then hold the work to the design it was scoped against.
How big does a company need to be?
Most of our work is with small and mid-sized businesses: large enough to have real ERP and integration complexity, small enough that one bad platform decision is felt across the whole company. If you have an ERP, several systems that do not talk to each other, and someone asking about AI, you are in the range.
Do we have to be a Microsoft shop?
Not entirely, but that is where our depth is. Dynamics 365, Azure integration services and the Microsoft data platform are where we can tell you what actually happens rather than what the documentation says. We are not a Microsoft partner or reseller, and that is deliberate — nothing about our position steers the answer toward one product. Everything else, we will say plainly when we are reasoning from principle rather than experience.
Do you build, or only advise?
Both, and the split is agreed up front. Some engagements end with a roadmap your own team executes. Others continue through integration, automation and governance work. What we will not do is design something and then quietly become the only party who understands it.
Where are you based?
Northern Michigan, and the work is remote-first. ERP and data work has been distributed for years; the parts that genuinely benefit from being in the room are usually the discovery sessions, and we plan for those.
What if the honest answer is that we are not ready?
Then that is the answer, and it is considerably cheaper to hear it before the budget is committed than after. Readiness gaps are usually specific and fixable, and knowing which three matter is more useful than a roadmap that pretends they do not exist.
Not sure which run to take?
The Trailhead Assessment is a short set of questions about your systems, data and processes. It ends with a practical map of what to modernize, what to automate, and what to leave alone.