Chaitanya Gunupudi
IT Platform Senior Cloud Engineer
University of Maryland
As research universities operate increasingly large portfolios of federated identity and certificate assets, including digital certificates issued through national federation services, the administrative and support burden of managing these resources at scale has grown alongside the user base. This briefing reports on a pilot effort to apply conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to the certificate lifecycle management workflow in a federated higher education environment, providing self-service guidance to departmental administrators navigating issuance, renewal, revocation, and federation-trust questions. The talk describes the design of the chatbot, its integration with existing identity and certificate management infrastructure, the considerations involved in surfacing federation-policy guidance through a language model, observations from early pilot use, and open questions around accuracy, auditability, and appropriate human-in-the-loop design. The briefing is intended for IT, identity, and research-computing staff at peer institutions exploring conversational interfaces over their own operational systems.
