Reference

Glossary.

Canonical definitions for the terms running through our work: the Managed Intelligence Provider category, the Centered AI Practice ladder, the CompleteCare seven-tier architecture, the Frontier Firm operating posture, and the named engagements and structural guarantees underneath.

01 · Category and operating model

The category we operate in, and the architecture underneath it.

Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP)

The operating model that replaces the Managed Services Provider. Named in late 2025 by the MSP industry analysts at Pax8 and Inforcer, an MIP delivers managed intelligence as a primary deliverable, runs a productized engagement model with Assess, Deploy, and Operate as a defined sequence, holds deep alignment with one AI platform while staying loyal to client outcomes, accumulates vertical-specific sector knowledge as a moat, and publishes structural guarantees with named remedies. The category is structural, not aspirational: a buyer can read a website, an SOW, and a price sheet and tell which side of the line a firm sits on.

Centered AI Practice

Centered Networks' family of productized AI engagements for mission-driven organizations on Microsoft 365. The 90-Day AI Roadmap establishes priorities; Copilot Kickstart and Agent Launchpad deliver the work it identifies; Frontier Transformation scales it; Managed AgentOps and CompleteCare Intelligence operate what reaches production. The paths branch rather than forming a fixed ladder. The Practice runs on top of CompleteCare Foundations as its identity, device, and email baseline.

CompleteCare

Centered Networks' managed-services brand and the seven-tier architecture the Centered AI Practice runs on. The seven stackable tiers in canonical order are Foundations, Govern, Automate, Insight, Construct, Intelligence, and Shield. Foundations is the universal starting point: the Microsoft 365 Business Premium baseline anchored to the CIS Top 18 IG1 cybersecurity standard. Clients add upper tiers as their maturity, regulatory exposure, and strategic priorities evolve. One master agreement covers the whole relationship, month-to-month from day one.

Frontier Firm

The operating posture a fully-deployed organization reaches when humans set direction and agents run entire business processes end-to-end. The term comes from Microsoft's Work Trend Index 2025: The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born, which describes a three-pattern progression from human-with-assistant work, through human-led agents as digital colleagues, to humans setting direction while multi-agent workflows execute. The Centered AI Practice ladder is calibrated to this progression, with Stage 3 Frontier Transformation as the engagement that lands an organization at the Pattern 3 destination.

The named offerings. Fixed price, fixed duration, fixed deliverable.

Discovery Sprint

The delivery method for the Centered Networks 90-Day AI Roadmap. A focused engagement combining structured interviews, Microsoft-environment review, prioritized use-case scoring, and dependency and governance analysis, producing a written 90-day roadmap and an executive readout. The Discovery Sprint is no longer sold as a separate offer; the roadmap it produces belongs to the client whether or not the engagement continues.

See also: 90-Day AI Roadmap, delivered through a Discovery Sprint.

AI Quickstart

A retired Centered Networks offer name. Its scope — shadow-AI discovery, Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness, use-case scoring, and a 90-day roadmap — was absorbed into the 90-Day AI Roadmap, which is now the single public AI diagnostic. The name is retained here because it appears in earlier Centered Networks material.

See also: 90-Day AI Roadmap, which absorbed the AI Quickstart scope.

Agent Launchpad

Stage 2 of the Centered AI Practice. A fixed-fee engagement that takes an organization from a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to a first production Copilot Studio agent in four to six weeks. Includes Copilot deployed into production, the first agent built from one of the six Centered Networks Agent Kits, and a governance baseline (Agent 365 registry, Entra Agent ID, content safety policies) in place. Priced at $25,000 to $50,000, with Microsoft funding through Copilot and Power Envisioning and Deployment Accelerator typically offsetting $15,000 to $50,000. Carries the 6-Week Production Promise, the First-Agent-Live Promise, and the Open Repo Promise.

Frontier Transformation

Stage 3 of the Centered AI Practice. A 90-day fixed-fee engagement that deploys the full Microsoft Frontier stack: Microsoft 365 E7 across the licensed user base, Microsoft Agent 365 control plane configured against Observe, Govern, and Secure, three or more production agents using multi-agent orchestration, identity perimeter modernized on the Entra Suite, and an AI Center of Excellence with governance rituals and a quarterly Responsible AI review. Priced at $75,000 to $150,000, with Microsoft Copilot Accelerate ECIF typically offsetting approximately $47,000.

Managed AgentOps

Stage 4 of the Centered AI Practice and the steady-state Managed Intelligence Provider relationship. A recurring, month-to-month operations discipline that runs every production agent against ten named workstreams: performance monitoring, prompt library curation, model lifecycle management, governance evolution review, shadow AI scan, FinOps for AI, KPI dashboard, Monthly Value Brief, Quarterly AI ROI and Risk Review, and new use-case development. Priced at $500 to $1,500 per agent per month plus 15% PEC on Copilot Studio consumption. Carries the No-Shadow-AI-Drift Promise.

Frontier Briefing

A private 90-minute board-level session for nonprofit, foundation, and rural-hospital leadership. Translates Microsoft's Frontier Firm direction (Copilot, agents, digital labour, and the maturity model behind it) into language a board can act on. No technical jargon, no sales pitch. Used by boards as the vocabulary-alignment step before approving a Discovery Sprint or an AI Quickstart.

Healthcare AI Readiness Assessment

A two-week, $7,500 HIPAA-aligned AI readiness assessment for rural hospitals, critical-access hospitals, FQHCs, and community healthcare systems. Audits AI governance against HIPAA technical and administrative safeguards, scores clinical and operational use cases for clinical risk, includes a BAA gap analysis, and produces a 90-day roadmap written in the format compliance committees and surveyors expect. For eligible hospitals, the engagement aligns to the Microsoft Rural Hospital Resiliency Program.

Rural Resiliency Readiness

A two-week, $5,000 fixed-fee productized engagement that takes a rural or critical-access hospital from initial consideration of the Microsoft Rural Hospital Resiliency Program to fully enrolled and operational. Includes eligibility verification and registration, license placement, Windows 10 ESU enrollment, a benefits utilization map across all nine Resiliency Program offerings, and a 90-day operational roadmap into CompleteCare Foundations and Shield.

M365 InstantOn

A productized way to bring real operating discipline to a Microsoft 365 Business Premium tenant: a CIS-aligned security baseline deployed across identity, devices, email, collaboration, and data protection. Centered Networks deploys the full baseline; the client enables each policy by group assignment at the pace its change-management process supports, so there is no fixed delivery clock. A one-time $15,000 Launch, with an optional $2,500 per month Managed lifecycle (twelve-month minimum) that keeps the baseline aligned as Microsoft changes the platform: more than 50 updates to Entra ID, Intune, and Defender in the last 12 months, and roughly 200 changes every 7 days. For HIPAA-covered organizations, a BAA is executed before kickoff and the baseline aligns to HHS 405(d). The Deployment Promise, Continuity Promise, and Portability Promise all apply.

The conditions we operate against, and the structural promises we make.

Shadow AI

Unsanctioned, ungoverned use of AI tools by staff inside an organization: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other consumer-grade or personal-tier AI services used on work data without IT's knowledge or governance posture attached. Shadow AI is not a future risk for mission-driven organizations; it is a present condition, with donor records, grant material, board minutes, client documentation, and, in healthcare contexts, PHI moving into models the organization does not control. The question is not whether shadow AI is happening, but whether the AI happening inside the organization is governed or ungoverned.

Copilot Cowork

A capability in Microsoft 365 Copilot, generally available since June 16, 2026, that plans and executes long-running, multi-step work across a user's Microsoft 365 apps. Where Copilot Chat answers a question in a single session, Cowork takes an outcome the user describes and carries the work forward over minutes to hours, drafting communications, building documents, organizing files, and scheduling, while the user stays in control with checkpoints. It is grounded in Work IQ and runs inside the Microsoft 365 security and compliance boundary. Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and is billed by usage through Copilot Credits.

Copilot Credits

Microsoft's usage-based billing currency for agentic AI work, pooled at the tenant level and consumed by capabilities such as Copilot Cowork, Work IQ APIs, and Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 agents. Purchased pay-as-you-go at 0.01 US dollars per credit, or prepaid annually at a 5 to 20 percent volume discount; prepaid credits are drawn down before pay-as-you-go. The Microsoft 365 Copilot per-seat license remains the floor; Copilot Credits meter the heavier work performed on top of it. Governed through the Cost Management dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Work IQ

Microsoft's workplace intelligence layer that grounds Copilot and agents in real business context, turning the emails, meetings, files, people, and business systems that shape a user's work into agent-ready intelligence with security and permission awareness built in. Microsoft 365 Copilot is natively built on Work IQ; the same intelligence is also exposed to custom agents and applications through the Work IQ APIs, which are billed through Copilot Credits and can cut context-retrieval token use substantially.

Portability Promise

A structural guarantee on M365 InstantOn that nothing about the client's baseline is locked inside a proprietary box. On request, at any time, Centered Networks delivers a portable export of the baseline configuration, every runbook in Markdown that the client owns forever, the full change history, and a documented offboarding path including rollback artifacts and an offboarding walkthrough. No offboarding fee, no data hostage. The artifacts are not proprietary scripts in a language no one else uses; any competent Microsoft Partner can read and continue from them.

Centered Agents

The catalog of six pre-built Copilot Studio agents Centered Networks delivers as productized Agent Kits for mission-driven workflows: Donor Intelligence (drafts donor outreach and major-gift prep grounded in the CRM), Intake and Routing (classifies and routes incoming forms and emails), Knowledge Keeper (answers staff questions grounded in policies and program documentation), Research Assistant (drafts grant prospect profiles and program literature synthesis), Constituent Support (handles routine constituent and patient-services questions, escalates the rest), and Board Reporter (synthesizes program data into board-ready reports). Each kit ships with a working prototype, configurable workflows, governance posture, and measurement framework, and is delivered governed, in production, in 4 to 6 weeks.