ADR-001 — The Company Brain remains local
Context
The Company Brain holds an organisation's most sensitive asset: its accumulated knowledge: projects, capabilities, previous bids, lessons learned, expert judgement. Cloud-hosted AI services offer convenience, but sending organisational knowledge to external providers creates two risks: the knowledge may inform someone else's model, and the organisation loses control over where its competitive advantage lives.
Decision
Organisational knowledge remains under company control. Retrieval and indexing happen locally whenever possible. Only the minimum context required for a specific reasoning step leaves the organisation, and model providers are treated as interchangeable.
Consequences
- Positive: privacy and compliance become structural properties of the system rather than policies bolted on afterwards. The organisation can adopt AI without surrendering the knowledge that makes it valuable.
- Negative: deployment is harder and infrastructure is more complex. This cost is operational and can be engineered down. The privacy gain is structural and compounds.