Last updated June 17, 2026 by Errin O'Connor, Founder & Chief AI Architect, EPC Group
What EPC Group Delivers with OpenAI
EPC Group is a 29-year Microsoft Solutions Partner with a senior-architect AI consulting practice that shipped OpenAI implementations since the GPT-3 beta. The OpenAI practice sits inside the broader AI consulting, Azure AI, and AI governance offerings, and is delivered alongside Microsoft 365 Copilot, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and the Power Platform agent stack for enterprises that need defensible cross-vendor model selection.
OpenAI Practice — Six Service Pillars
- Azure OpenAI Service architecture. Preferred deployment for regulated enterprises — Microsoft tenant data residency, Entra identity, Purview classification, audit log integration, and consolidated Azure compliance posture.
- ChatGPT Enterprise rollout. Tenant deployment for productivity, SSO via Microsoft Entra, data-isolation posture, change management, and integration with Microsoft 365 where appropriate.
- Custom GPTs and Assistants API. Departmental Custom GPTs for specific business processes (finance, HR, legal, sales enablement, support), Assistants API for stateful agentic workloads, and tool-use integration with Microsoft Graph + Power Platform.
- Fine-tuning and embeddings. Domain-specific model fine-tuning, embedding-based retrieval against SharePoint and Microsoft Graph corpora, vector store architecture, and grounded generation patterns.
- Agentic workflows. Multi-step agents using GPT-4o or o1/o3 reasoning as the core, Microsoft Entra non-human identity, decision boundaries, audit trails, and the seven-layer agentic governance framework.
- Safety, compliance, and governance. Content filter tuning, Purview classification of prompts and responses, immutable audit logging, jailbreak resistance testing, and the architecture artifacts buyers need for security review.
Why Azure OpenAI Service Over Direct OpenAI API
- Microsoft tenant data residency — prompts and responses stay inside the customer's Azure subscription.
- Microsoft Entra identity, conditional access, and PIM apply natively.
- Purview classification, sensitivity labels, and Communication Compliance apply natively.
- SOC 2, HIPAA (BAA), FedRAMP (Azure Government), FINRA, GxP — all under the customer's existing Azure compliance posture.
- Consolidated billing under the existing Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreement.
- EPC Group already operates the Azure tenant under managed services — extending to Azure OpenAI is incremental.
Engagement Model
OpenAI consulting engagements run on The EPC Group Lifecycle — Assess, Modernize, Govern, Operate, Enable — with fixed-fee accountability at every stage and the same senior architects accountable from costed roadmap through 24/7 operations on the Azure OpenAI tenant.
Frequently Asked Questions
EPC Group delivers Azure OpenAI Service architecture (preferred deployment path for regulated enterprises), ChatGPT Enterprise rollout for productivity, custom GPT design for departmental workflows, Assistants API patterns for agentic workloads, fine-tuning programs for domain-specific models, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented patterns against SharePoint and Microsoft Graph, safety guardrails, and the seven-layer agentic governance framework.
Scope a ChatGPT / OpenAI engagement
Senior-architect-only delivery. Azure OpenAI Service preferred. Microsoft-tenant data residency. Seven-layer agentic governance. Fixed-fee at every stage of The EPC Group Lifecycle.