The first question facing organisations that want to use AI is not technical — it is about data. Will contracts, price lists, customer correspondence, technical drawings and production recipes be sent to an external service? In some organisations this is a preference; in others it is an obligation arising from a customer contract or a sector-specific sensitivity. Whichever the answer, the decision shapes the architecture from the outset, and changing it later is expensive.
Open-source models running in-house offer an answer to this question. Data never leaves the server, there is no per-use fee, and the model version stays under your control. But honesty requires stating the price: hardware investment is needed, models that can run in-house trail the most capable closed models, and maintaining the infrastructure becomes your responsibility. An on-premise proposal that leaves out these three points is incomplete.
In practice the most balanced outcome usually lands somewhere between the two. Most tasks can be done well enough by a model running in-house: internal document search, summarisation, classification, drafting. Meanwhile a small number of complex tasks need a stronger model — and those tasks usually contain no sensitive data. The routing layer we build makes exactly this distinction: which job goes to which model is set by rule, and requests containing sensitive data never leave the organisation.
The second part of this infrastructure is measurement. When nobody measures which department uses how much, what each job costs and how quality shifts over time, AI spending turns into a line item nobody owns. With measurement in place, the opposite happens: which uses genuinely create value, and which were tried and dropped, become visible. We deliver the deployment together with this measurement.