How do local models compare with hosted models for internal workflows?

If you are non-technical, demand a sandbox with sample data and a 30-minute setup path. Anything that needs a solutions engineer for the first win will stall on a small team.

Source quality beat model size for us. Clean knowledge + tool scopes fixed more hallucinations than switching models.

We ran a 3-week pilot with a similar brief. The biggest gap was ownership after launch — if ops cannot edit prompts and tools without engineering, it dies. Pick the platform your weekly owner can actually maintain.

Agree on rollback and permissions before demos. We lost a week because the agent could write CRM fields with no audit trail. Make “field-level history” a go/no-go in the RFP.

Budget-wise, usage pricing looked cheaper until support volume spiked. Model a bad week, not an average day. That alone flipped our shortlist.