The Certero AI Assistant lets authorised users ask plain-English questions of live asset, software and licence data. It is off until an administrator enables it, and it can never return data the person asking is not already entitled to see.
The answers your senior leadership needs are already in your data. The problem is the distance between the question and the answer.
Your SaaS and SAM teams know the compliance position for Microsoft Office. Your procurement lead knows which renewals are approaching. Your IT director knows which licences are sitting unused. Getting any of that into the hands of a CFO, a CISO or a VP has meant a reporting cycle, a specialist, and time nobody has.
CerteroX closes that gap. This release introduces the Certero AI Assistant: a natural language layer built into the platform your teams already use to govern everything you own. Ask a question in plain English. Get an answer drawn from live data. No report to build, no query to write, no specialist to wait for.
It is also the release that completes a long-running milestone. The Certero Unified Platform is now CerteroX — the same foundation, a refreshed experience with Light and Dark modes, and no change to existing workflows, navigation or configuration.
Two things matter at leadership level.
The first is the Certero AI Assistant. Any authorised user can query the platform in natural language and get answers drawn from live data covering hardware and devices, installed and metered software, licensing across the six publishers with dedicated engines, Active Directory, network discovery data and dashboards. Questions that previously needed specialist effort return in seconds.
The second is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which lets your teams query CerteroX data from the AI tools they already work in — including Claude Desktop and ChatGPT — under administrator-managed keys.
Both are controlled by your organisation from the moment they are deployed.
Most enterprise IT environments are not short of data. They are short of speed of access. A leadership team asking “what is our compliance position for Microsoft Office?” does not need a report built on last quarter’s numbers. It needs an answer drawn from the live position, now.
That is what the Assistant provides. Ask which licences expire in the next 30 days. Ask which software titles are deployed across your technology assets. Ask what the current compliance position is for a specific publisher. The Assistant runs a structured query against your live data model and returns a structured answer.
The consequence is a shift in who can reach strategic IT intelligence. Previously that access belonged to whoever ran the reports. With the Assistant enabled, a CFO preparing for a board review, a VP of IT briefing a renewal negotiation and a CISO conducting a governance audit can all get current answers without routing a request through a specialist.
Current data, not last quarter’s snapshot. That distinction is the operational difference.
Unused entitlements, renewal exposure and licensing risk are the categories where organisations lose the most money and carry the most audit exposure. When surfacing them requires a specialist and a reporting cycle, they surface late. When any authorised user can ask the question directly, they surface early.
The result is a shorter path from insight to action. Renewal negotiations happen against current data. Licence reclamation decisions happen before the next audit rather than after it.
The same applies on the cloud side, where the questions are answerable against the same platform. Certero’s average cloud cost saving across environments under management is 38%, achieved by addressing idle, oversized and misconfigured resources — the kind of finding that only gets acted on when somebody can see it without commissioning a report first.
This is the question every CISO and governance lead asks first, and the answer is what separates this from AI features bolted onto enterprise platforms. Four principles govern the design.
Entitlement-bound responses. The Assistant can only return data the user is already permitted to see. That boundary is enforced on the server, not hidden in the interface. A user who cannot see licensing data in the platform cannot reach it through the Assistant either.
Administrator control from day one. AI features are disabled by default. An administrator must explicitly enable them in Global Settings, and can switch them off platform-wide instantly with no restart.
Protected configuration. The Assistant is barred from disclosing sensitive configuration data, including API keys, even when an administrator asks for it.
Grounded, not improvised. Data answers run structured queries against your asset model. They do not generate free-form SQL. How-to answers draw only from official Certero documentation. The Assistant does not improvise outside its authorised scope.
The summary for your CISO: this does not create a new attack surface. It operates inside the entitlement and security boundaries that already govern access to your data.
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets AI tools connect to external data sources in a controlled, structured way. Rather than requiring every AI query to run through the CerteroX interface, the MCP server brings CerteroX data into the tools your teams already use.
This is not a single bolt-on. Every CerteroX product exposes an MCP server, so an agent can query your asset record, your licence position, your SaaS subscriptions and your cloud bill through one protocol. Access is scoped with per-organisation tokens, and every tool call is audited and quota-tracked — so you can see exactly what an agent asked for, and when.
Connections require administrator-managed API keys, and the gateway is not exposed in the platform interface. The same governance principles that apply to the built-in Assistant apply to MCP access.
The position is deliberate: this platform is not a walled garden. Your AI tools and your asset data should work together, governed by you.
Four priorities drive technology decisions at executive level, and the Assistant maps to each.
Reduce technology spend. Waste, unused licences and renewal exposure surface to everyone with authorised access, rather than waiting for a specialist to build a criteria query.
Control risk. Defensible licence positions require current data. The Assistant queries the live model, so the positions it returns are not snapshots. More importantly, risk control here is not a matter of trusting the model to stay in its lane — it is enforced by the same entitlement system that governs the rest of the platform.
Accelerate the organisation. When senior leaders can ask a direct question and get a trusted answer, specialist teams stop absorbing routine reporting requests and that capacity moves to analysis.
Protect what you already run. This arrives inside the platform you already operate, against the data model you already trust, with no separate data-exposure trade-off to accept.
Enabling the Assistant requires administrator action, because AI features are off by default. An administrator goes to Global Settings and turns the feature on. It can be switched off again at platform level instantly, with no restart. Control stays with your IT organisation at every stage.
Our team can walk you through activation, advise on query-volume planning for your organisation, and configure the MCP server if your teams want to connect CerteroX data to external AI tools. Talk to us or book a demo.
A natural language query capability built into CerteroX. Authorised users ask plain-English questions about their hardware, software, licensing, Active Directory and network data, and receive answers drawn from live data rather than a report.
No. AI features in CerteroX are disabled by default. An administrator must explicitly enable them through Global Settings, and can switch them off platform-wide at any time with no restart.
It is entitlement-bound: it can only return data the user is already authorised to see, enforced on the server rather than hidden in the interface. It is barred from disclosing sensitive configuration such as API keys. Data answers run structured queries against the asset model rather than free-form SQL, and how-to answers draw only from official Certero documentation.
CerteroX exposes a Model Context Protocol server built on an open standard, so teams can query CerteroX data from external AI tools including Claude Desktop and ChatGPT. Access requires administrator-managed API keys, tokens are scoped per organisation, and every tool call is audited. The gateway is not exposed in the platform interface.
The Certero Unified Platform is now CerteroX, with a refreshed experience including Light and Dark modes. There are no changes to existing workflows, navigation or configuration for current customers.
A platform administrator. The feature is controlled centrally through Global Settings and requires an administrator account. If you are unsure about configuration or query-volume planning, speak to your Certero account team first.
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Everything argued above is checkable. Name the publisher, the billing account or the platform you would argue with, and the session is built around it — the reasoning attached, not a summary slide.
No gated download at the end of it.