ProductSeptember 12, 2026 · 4 min read

You can now run your CI's AI on your own hardware

Competitive intelligence is some of the most sensitive data a company has. So why does every other CI tool send it to someone else's model? PrismCI can now search and retrieve entirely on-box — no external AI calls at all.

Ask a competitive-intelligence platform a question and, until now, that question left your building. It went to a cloud AI model — along with the context needed to answer it — and you took it on faith that it was handled well. For a lot of teams, that trade was fine. For security-first and regulated teams, it was the reason competitive intelligence never got fully turned on.

PrismCI removes the trade. Its assistant, Ask CI, can now run its entire search-and-retrieval brain on your own hardware — the part that reads your knowledge base, finds the right passages, and ranks them for relevance. No external AI calls. No per-query cost. The questions your reps and analysts ask never leave your network.

"On-box" — in plain terms

Two jobs sit behind every good answer: finding the right information, and writing it up. The finding — turning your documents into something searchable and pulling back the passages that matter — is what now runs locally, on the same server PrismCI already lives on. It's on by an admin's choice, and switching it on re-reads your library in the background while the assistant stays up the whole time.

The result you can feel: search that costs nothing per query, keeps improving, and keeps your data — and your questions — inside your walls.

But is it any good?

That's the fair question. Running locally only matters if the answers hold up. In our own testing, on-box retrieval matched a leading cloud model on quality — and on a like-for-like comparison of the raw search step, edged ahead. You don't give up relevance to gain ownership.

Competitive intelligence is a set of your sharpest secrets. The instinct to keep it in-house is the right one — the tooling just finally caught up to it.

Where this leaves the cloud

You still choose. Want a frontier cloud model to write the final answer? Use OpenAI, Anthropic, or OpenRouter — with redaction, budgets, a kill switch, and a full audit before anything leaves. Want the tightest possible perimeter? Keep retrieval on-box and govern the rest. It's your call, per feature, and you can change your mind.

Paired with self-hosting, this is the whole pitch in one line: your competitive intelligence, and now the AI that reads it, inside your own perimeter.

see it on your own data

Put PrismCI to work on your competitive landscape.

Book a walkthrough and we'll show you the AI automation, the flexibility, and the self-hosted deployment — on a competitor set that matters to you.