You connect ChatGPT to your company’s ERP by pointing it at a governed MCP layer that sits between ChatGPT and the ERP. Datafi is that layer: it checks every request against the person’s own access, reads the data live from the source, and copies nothing.
That is the short answer. The rest of this article explains how it works, what it protects, and what it costs, so you can decide if it fits.
The real challenge of connecting ChatGPT to your ERP is not the connection itself — it is enforcing who sees what once it is connected. A governed MCP layer like Datafi solves this by applying per-user, row-level access control to every AI request, live from the source, with no data copied.
Why Can’t ChatGPT Just Read My ERP Today?
ChatGPT Business and Enterprise support MCP connectors, which means ChatGPT can reach a server you point it at. That is a real step forward. But a connector is only a doorway. It does not decide who is allowed through it.
Native connectors cover search and fetch for the tools they were built for. Your ERP is different. It holds orders, invoices, inventory, payroll-adjacent costs and vendor terms, and each person in your company is allowed to see only part of it. A sales rep should not see margin by customer. A plant manager should not see another plant’s budget.
So the real question is not “can ChatGPT connect?” It is “who sees what once it does?”
How Does the Governed MCP Layer Work?
Datafi sits between ChatGPT and the systems your business runs on. ChatGPT sends requests to Datafi over MCP. From there, each request follows the same path:
- Datafi checks it against that person’s per-user, row-level access.
- It adds business context, so “last quarter’s open orders” means what your company means by it.
- It reads the answer live from the ERP. Nothing is copied or migrated.
- It returns the answer to ChatGPT and logs the request in Control Tower.
The result is per-user access control for AI that works the way your ERP already works. Two people can ask ChatGPT the same question and get different answers, because they are allowed to see different rows. That is correct behavior, not a bug.
Does This Replace ChatGPT?
No. Keep ChatGPT. Your teams already know it, and Datafi makes it more useful by giving it your company’s own data.
The same layer works with the other AI tools people use: Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Llama, and internal or fine-tuned models. That matters because different teams rarely standardize on one tool. Finance may live in Copilot while operations prefers ChatGPT. With one governed layer, every AI client gets the same rules, the same business context and the same audit trail.
The ERP is also rarely alone. Datafi connects to CRM, HRIS, TMS, cloud and on-prem databases, legacy and home-grown systems, messaging apps, document libraries and file storage. So a question in ChatGPT can pull from your ERP and your CRM in one answer, still limited to what the asker may see.
What Can People Do Once It Is Connected?
Datafi gives you two paths.
Converse is for talking to your data. People ask complex questions in plain English, generate reports and build documents from live data, all from the AI tool they already use.
Activate is for putting AI to work. You build and deploy apps, agents and automated workflows on the same governed data.
How Is Security Handled?
Every request is checked, and every request is logged. Control Tower gives you observability over who asked what, which tools they used and what came back. That answers the audit question before an auditor asks it.
Datafi is SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA and ISO 27001 compliant. For hosting, you can choose Datafi Hosted for up to 100 users, ready in about a minute, or Customer Hosted in your own cloud, which is required over 100 users and ready in about a day.
What Does It Cost?
Pricing is published. Converse needs Basic licenses at $20 per license a month. Activate adds Standard licenses at $40 per license a month.
License spend turns into usage credits in one shared pool, at $0.004 each. Basic adds 5,000 credits a month and Standard adds 10,000. A data read costs 1 credit and a write costs 3. If you need more, credits come in 10K ($40 a month), 100K ($380 a month) and 1M ($3,600 a month) increments. The starting point is 50 users for $12,000 a year.
How Fast Can We Start?
The launch workshop takes 3 days or less and puts a production use case live. You pick one team and one dataset, usually a slice of your ERP, and connect it to the ChatGPT your people already use.
If you want to see ChatGPT answer from your own ERP data, with each person seeing only their own rows, plan a launch workshop. You will leave with a working use case, not a slide deck.
FAQ
Do I need an MCP server to connect ChatGPT to my ERP? You need something that speaks MCP, because that is how ChatGPT reaches outside systems. You can build that server yourself, but you would also have to build per-user access, business context and logging. Datafi provides a managed layer that already does all three.
Will ChatGPT see data a user is not allowed to see? No. Datafi checks each request against the person’s own row-level access before reading anything. Two users asking the same question can get different answers, matching what each can see in the ERP.
Do we have to copy or migrate our ERP data first? No. Datafi reads live from the source system and copies nothing. That means there is no nightly extract to maintain and no second copy of your data to secure.
