Column · Cloudless agents
We build AI agents that run on a machine at your premises — not in a cloud service. It is not a technical trick. It is a different answer to the question of who actually has access to your data.
By Lasse Veirum Larsen, HumAIn Labs · Hobro, Denmark
Most AI solutions you meet today are a thin app in front of a remote service. You type something, it is sent away, a model answers, and the answer comes back. It works flawlessly — until the connection drops, the subscription changes price, or somebody asks where the data actually sits.
We chose the other road. The agents run on a machine standing in the building. The model is a file on the disk. Documents, tools, logs and decisions all stay in the same place. Nothing is called out over the network, because there is nothing to call: everything the agent needs, it already has locally.
A language model of a size that fits on an ordinary graphics card or a small workstation — typically between eight and seventy billion parameters — combined with what turns a model into an agent: a set of tools, a workflow, a log, and a number of points in the flow where a human has to approve the next step.
The architecture is the same as in the cloud. Only the location differs. A typical setup at a customer is one machine under a desk, drawing around 200–400 watts under load, and keeping at work when the phone has no signal, the factory network is down, or somebody fiddles with the router over the weekend.
We use what we sell. Our own operation runs on local models: agents that read and sort documents, write minutes, track tasks, monitor workflows and ask permission when an action is sensitive.
We do not start with a technology, but with a task. The process usually looks like this:
It is not magic, and it is not free. A local model is not the largest model. Very broad world knowledge and the hardest language tasks are still handled better by the large cloud models, and there are tasks where sending data away is the right solution. Local means hardware with enough memory — and someone to maintain it.
We say so when that is the case. An agent running locally is not automatically secure — it is only secure if somebody has set limits on what it may touch, and verified that the limits hold. That work is not something you buy your way out of with a model.
Cloudless does not mean old-fashioned. It means the AI can be in operation without data leaving the building, and without anyone being able to shut it off with a price increase or a failed API. The question is no longer whether the AI may see your data. It is whether it has to take it with it.
Would you rather see it run than read about it? We will gladly put a machine at your site and solve a real task on it.
Tell us about the routine — we will say if it does not fit.