Private AI or cloud AI: what fits a law firm, a clinic or a company

The difference in one sentence

With cloud AI, your questions and documents travel to another company's servers. With private AI, the model runs on a server you own, in your office or your private cloud, and the information stays there.

When private AI fits

• You handle confidential information: case files, patient records, contracts or client data.
• Your client, parent company or professional body doesn't allow uploading documents to outside services.
• You'd rather have a fixed cost than pay per user every month.
• You need it to keep working when the internet goes down.

When the cloud fits

• You need the most capable model for writing, analysis or coding.
• You don't handle sensitive data, or the provider gives you the guarantees you need.
• You'd rather not have a server in the office.

What to know first

Open models running on your own server do less than the best cloud models. For searching and summarizing your own documents they work very well; for general tasks, the cloud still wins. That's why we test it with your real documents before quoting.

The other cost is hardware: a server with a GPU. Sometimes it costs more than the installation, so it's worth knowing from the first call.

A mix works too

Many companies use both: private AI for confidential work and the cloud for everything else. What matters is deciding, one type of document at a time, what can leave the company and what can't.