Where does our data actually go, and could it end up training a public model?
Requests go to the provider you approve, through an API account in your organisation's own name with training and retention switched off. Business API tiers are contractually excluded from training in a way consumer chat apps are not, which is exactly why we stop staff pasting records into a browser tab instead. We redact or tokenise names, ID numbers and payment details before the call whenever the task does not need them, and log every request so an audit is possible later. If your rules say nothing may leave your infrastructure at all, that is doable with a self-hosted open-weight model — it will be slower and less capable, and we would rather tell you that now than after you have paid for it.
What happens when the model gets something wrong?
It will get things wrong, so we design as though it already has. Anything that writes to your database, sends a message or moves money is proposed by the model and confirmed by a person or a rule — one click to approve, never a re-type. Retrieval answers are cited back to the source document, so a wrong answer is visible in seconds rather than trusted for a month. We also keep a set of your real cases with known-correct answers, which means accuracy drifting after a provider updates a model shows up as a failing test rather than a customer complaint.
What will this cost us to run each month once it is live?
Cheaper than most people expect for text, dearer than most expect for images and long scanned documents. A support assistant handling a few thousand messages a month usually sits in the tens of dollars of model spend; extracting data from hundreds of scanned pages a day is where the bill becomes a real line item, and we model that during the prototype so you see the figure before committing. Usage runs on your own provider account with per-feature metering and a hard spend cap, so a runaway loop stops instead of quietly billing you. Hosting and any support retainer are quoted separately — we do not bundle them into a single vague AI fee.
Do we need to train our own model?
Almost certainly not. Nearly every business problem we are asked to solve is a retrieval and prompting problem: the answer already exists in your documents and your database, and the work is getting the right context in front of a general model. Fine-tuning earns its place in narrow, high-volume tasks with a fixed output format, and even then we try prompting and retrieval first, because a fine-tune has to be redone every time the base model moves on. Training a model from scratch is a research budget, not a software budget — if someone is selling you one for a business workflow, ask what it does that a well-built prompt cannot.
How does AI fit into software we already have?
That is the usual case for us — a Laravel job, an API endpoint, a panel on a screen your team already opens every morning, rather than a separate AI tool nobody remembers to log into. The model call sits behind one small interface in your repository, so changing provider or model later is a config change and a re-run of the test set. The hard part is rarely the model; it is permissions, making certain the assistant cannot surface a record the person asking is not allowed to see, which we enforce with the same access rules as the rest of the application. Where your existing code is old or undocumented, expect a week or two of reading it before we touch anything.