What is a Managed Intelligence Provider?
Why the operating model around AI has to evolve beyond traditional managed services—and what replaces it.
Read the MIP position paperInsights
Practical guidance for operating AI on Microsoft.
The technology changes quickly. The operating questions are more durable: what should be automated, what has to be governed, where human judgment belongs, what Microsoft capabilities already exist, and how an organization measures whether AI is creating real value.
Start here
The load-bearing reads.
How Centered Networks delivers Managed Intelligence.
Prepare, Adopt, Agentify, Operate: the commercial operating model behind the category.
See Managed IntelligenceManaged Intelligence vs. the traditional MSP.
A twelve-row comparison of what changes when the object being managed is intelligence, not infrastructure.
Read the comparisonAll insights
Useful enough to take into the next meeting.
Your staff can already build agents. Nine controls to set before they do.
In a default Microsoft 365 tenant, Copilot Studio authoring access belongs to every user in Microsoft Entra. Nobody granted it. Nine agent governance controls across the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Power Platform admin center, the SharePoint carve-out that catches everyone, and the order to set them in.
Read the field noteAgent pilots don’t stall on the technology. Six reasons they stall, and what to do.
The agent works. Ninety days later, four people use it and two are on the project team. Six documented sources of resistance and how each lands in a forty-person nonprofit, how to pick a first scenario worth finishing, and the three-rung ladder that separates usage from impact.
Read the field noteCopilot Cowork and the shift to usage-based AI: what FY27 means for mission-driven organizations.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork is generally available, and it brings usage-based billing to Copilot through Copilot Credits. The feature is impressive. The billing model is the bigger story: the shift from paying per seat to paying per seat plus usage, and what that means when the budget is tight and the board asks hard questions.
Read the perspectiveBoston Children's saved roughly $7M with AI automation. A rural hospital can run the same playbook.
Boston Children's reported 50+ AI automations, tens of thousands of staff hours saved, and roughly $7M in redeployed labor. The same operational automations run on Microsoft 365, Copilot, the Power Platform, and Azure OpenAI — the stack a rural hospital is likely already licensed for, governed before it’s turned on.
Read the field notePax8 named the agentic workforce economy. Here is what it means for mission-driven organizations.
Pax8’s new report argues the divide that decides the next decade is between organizations that use AI and those that operationalize it. What its findings—the three-hour dividend, the governance emergency, the internal-first flywheel, and the $1.3 trillion shift from MSP to MIP—mean for nonprofits, foundations, and rural hospitals.
Read the perspectiveMicrosoft put us on the main stage at Pax8 Beyond 2026 as a Frontier partner.
During the main keynote, Microsoft’s Chief Partner Officer, Nicole Dezen, named Centered Networks on stage as a leading Frontier partner, next to Infinity Group, NexusTek, and Sourcepass. What being a Frontier Firm actually means, and why we made ourselves customer zero before bringing AI to a single client.
Read the perspectiveWhy I founded AutoGrant: the next stage of AI is vertical.
I’m building AutoGrant as a company separate from Centered Networks, even though I founded both. Why the split made sense, what AutoGrant’s grant agents actually do, and why the next wave of useful AI is teams of specialized agents built for a single domain.
Read the perspective$50 billion for rural hospitals: what the Rural Health Transformation Program funds.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act put the largest one-time investment in rural health in a generation on the table. Cybersecurity, IT modernization, and AI are named, allowable uses. What the program funds, how to frame the ask, and how to position your hospital before the window closes.
Read the field noteThe Microsoft 365 tenant is the new server. Treat it like one.
In a cloud-first world, your Microsoft 365 tenant holds identity, devices, email, and data, and it earns the same operating discipline once reserved for the server room. Microsoft ships new security capabilities constantly, but they are not switched on automatically. Why a documented baseline is the unit that matters now.
Read the field noteMicrosoft Scout: what an always-on agent could do for mission-driven organizations.
Microsoft just announced Scout, an always-on Autopilot with its own Entra identity that lives across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint. It is experimental, Frontier-gated, and explicitly enterprise-pitched. The mission-driven sector is not in the press release. The use cases are everywhere.
Read the perspectiveThe token bill is coming.
Dell just posted a record quarter selling the servers that run AI. As workloads move from pilot to production, that compute lands on your budget as LLM token spend. Why production AI economics will rhyme with the cloud era, and how to chart the right balance.
Read the perspectiveShadow AI is already in your organization. The question is what to do about it.
Most boards we talk to assume shadow AI is a future risk. It isn’t. It’s a present condition. Three failure modes, the seven-day diagnostic question, and what the governed response actually looks like.
Read the field noteBefore you enable Copilot: seven questions every mission-driven board should answer first.
A Copilot rollout fails or succeeds in the seven decisions made before the license switch flips. A board-level checklist: data exposure, sensitivity labels, conditional access, responsible-AI policy, training, output review, and the kill switch.
Read the field noteWhat a Discovery Sprint actually delivers, day by day.
Two weeks. Six phases from intake through readout. What we do, what you do, and what you walk away with on day 14.
Read the field noteMicrosoft 365 Copilot vs ChatGPT for nonprofits: an honest comparison.
The marketing for both tools makes the choice sound obvious in opposite directions. The honest answer is more nuanced. Three factors that decide it, the cost reality, and where each genuinely shines.
Read the comparisonA foundation board AI charter you can adopt today.
Most foundation boards approved an AI policy from a template they never modified. The problem is that template policies do not survive contact with deployment. Here is a charter built from real deployments: yours to adopt verbatim, modify, or use as a starting point.
Read the resourceAnthropic and OpenAI launched AI services firms. Mission-driven organizations need a different kind of partner.
In the past three weeks, the two largest AI labs in the world have launched standalone enterprise services firms. The pattern matters. So does the gap they’re leaving open for mission-driven organizations.
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Occasional perspectives from Centered Networks on the Managed Intelligence Provider model, governed AI on Microsoft, and what changes for nonprofits, foundations, and rural hospitals. No marketing fluff. Unsubscribe any time.
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