Why local
Why keep the AI in the building?
Not because the cloud is evil. Because for a business with years of its own documents, keeping the answers in-house removes a set of problems rather than managing them.
The problem nobody put on a list
Somebody in your business has already pasted work into a free AI tool. A quote, a customer email, a section of a contract, maybe a drawing. They were not being careless — they were being efficient, and nobody had told them otherwise.
What went out with it is the part that matters: the prices, the methods and the know-how that win you work. Not because anyone is reading it, but because it left your control and there is no record that it did.
You cannot stop people wanting AI. You can give them one you control.
If that is the immediate worry, the policy builder writes you a one-page rule set in two minutes, free, without asking for an email address.
What changes when it runs in your building
The data question stops being a question
Nothing is transferred to a third party for processing, so the hardest parts of the GDPR conversation — international transfers, processor agreements, retention on somebody else's servers — do not arise. You stay the only controller of your own data.
Nobody can change the terms on you
Open-weight models installed on your own machine cannot be repriced, rate-limited, deprecated or switched off remotely. A cloud provider's promise not to train on your data is a document they wrote and can rewrite. A machine with no route out is a fact about the building.
It costs the same with ten people as with two
One appliance serves the whole team. There is no per-seat licence, so the tenth person costs nothing to add — which is usually where per-seat subscriptions stop being cheap.
It works when the line is down
It does not use the internet to answer, so a broadband outage does not stop your team asking questions of their own files.
When the cloud is the right answer
Often, honestly. If you are a handful of people, using AI lightly, with nothing especially confidential going into it, a per-seat subscription is cheaper and simpler and you should buy that instead. The arithmetic flips with the number of seats and the sensitivity of the work, not with how strongly anyone feels about it.
We have written the three-year comparison out properly, including the cases where renting wins: renting AI vs owning it →. If you would rather see the adoption figures with sources attached, they are on the statistics page — dated, linked, and none of them ours.
If you want the whole picture in one place, start with private AI for small businesses. If the problem turns out to be admin rather than documents, business process automation is the cheaper road and we will say so.
What it looks like in practice
One box, installed on your network, reading the files you already own. Your team asks it questions in plain English and gets an answer with the source shown, so it can be checked. Figures from spreadsheets are computed rather than guessed, and when the answer is not in your files it says so instead of inventing one.
That last part is the difference between a tool people trust and a tool people quietly stop using. See what Cortex does →
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Questions people actually ask
Is local AI actually better, or just more private?
For a lot of businesses it is mostly about privacy and cost control. The quality of open-weight models is now good enough for the jobs most SMEs want done — reading their own documents and answering questions about them. For writing marketing copy or general research, a cloud tool is often fine, and we will say so.
What is actually the risk with cloud AI tools?
Two things. The first is what your team is already pasting into free tools — quotes, customer emails, drawings — usually with nobody's permission and no record. The second is that the terms protecting your data are written by the provider and can change. Neither is a scandal. Both are worth having an answer to.
Does the data really never leave?
The appliance runs on your network and does not need the internet to answer a question. You can unplug the line and watch it keep working — that is the demonstration we do, because it is the only version of the claim you should believe.
What about updates, then?
Updates are something we bring to you, not something the appliance fetches on its own. That is the trade for it not phoning anywhere.
Is this cheaper than a subscription?
It depends entirely on how many people would need a seat and for how long. We have written the three-year arithmetic out both ways, including the cases where renting wins.