A Catholic archdiocese came to us with a problem that had already stopped two earlier attempts: they could see exactly where AI would help their staff, and none of the ways to get it were allowed.
The Challenge
The material they wanted to work with was the material they could least afford to expose — sacramental registers, personnel files, and confidential correspondence going back decades. Sending any of it to a commercial assistant meant transmitting it to a third party, storing it on infrastructure they did not control, and trusting a retention policy they could not audit.
That is not a risk tolerance problem. For records held in trust, it is a hard line.
Our Approach
We took the cloud out of the equation entirely:
- Deployed an open-weight model on hardware the archdiocese owns, inside their own network
- Configured it so the system makes no outbound calls — there is no API key to leak and no vendor account to compromise
- Set up retrieval over their existing document stores, so staff query the records they already have
- Trained the team on what the system can and cannot do, in plain language
The Result
Staff can now ask questions of confidential records and get useful answers back, and the data never leaves the building. There is no third party in the loop, because there is no loop — the model runs on a machine they can walk up to and unplug.
Ownership was the point. They run it, they control it, and nothing about it depends on us continuing to exist.
Sommelier.