TCO Audit
Where should your AI run, and what will it cost? Cloud versus local versus colocation, modeled on your workloads.
Most companies will overpay for AI the way they overpaid for cloud, by never asking where it should run. Intelix answers that in weeks, with a break-even model: which workloads belong on hardware you own, which stay on frontier APIs, and where human judgment stays in control. Start with the 4-minute readiness assessment
Companies don't fail at AI because they lack models. They fail because nobody's doing the math.
You shouldn't need a CIO to buy this. Whether you run an owner-led local firm or a regional operation, the engagement is the same: we find where money and hours leak, then install AI and automation that stop the leak. Sovereign where your data is sensitive, and boringly practical everywhere else. Eight levers, one plan, one accountable firm.
Your own models on hardware you control. Client files, patient records, and trade secrets never leave the building, and they never train someone else's model.
AI, cloud, and software spend audited line by line, routed to the cheapest capable option, and capped so the bill can't surprise you again.
Intake, data entry, scheduling, follow-ups: the repetitive half of every job handed to automation you control, so your people do the work you actually hired them for.
Quote-to-invoice, order-to-fulfillment, inquiry-to-answer: whole chains wired end to end so work moves without being chased.
We map how work actually flows through your business, measure where it stalls, and remove the steps that exist only because they always have.
Hardware, licenses, vendors, and people-hours placed where they earn their keep, and cut where they don't.
Legacy systems, paper processes, and spreadsheets-as-database brought current one step at a time, without a rip-and-replace bet.
Lead capture, follow-up, proposals, and reviews systematized, so growth stops depending on whoever remembered to send the email.
Most AI runs on rented cloud GPUs by reflex. For sustained inference, owned or colocated hardware often crosses over in months, and the smallest capable model does the routine work for a fraction of the token cost. We model both with your numbers.
Frontier models doing tagging and extraction is the most common line item we cut. Route it to a small model and the same work runs at a fraction of the spend, with tighter privacy.
Run your own numbers in the TCO calculatorThe industry is racing horizontally: more parameters, longer context windows, broader general intelligence. That race is won by a handful of labs, and you rent the result by the token. Vertical growth is the axis that's yours: how deeply AI understands your domain, your workflows, your edge cases. It doesn't come from scale. It comes from your own experts correcting, gating, and teaching systems that get better inside your walls.
General capability is a commodity on a falling price curve. Buy it by the token, route to it when the work genuinely needs frontier reasoning, and never build your advantage on something everyone else can rent too.
Domain depth can't be bought. It compounds: small models tuned on your taxonomy, retrieval over your corpus, and workflows where every human correction becomes training signal instead of friction.
Vertical growth requires people by design. Experts in the loop aren't a safety tax, they're the only teachers your domain has. Systems without them stay horizontal: broad, shallow, and identical to your competitors'.
Every engagement and the Playbook run on this split: rent the horizontal, own the vertical.
42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17% the year before (S&P Global). Those aren't model failures; they're operating failures: no placement math, no routing discipline, no governance. The Operating Layer is the fix: three phases, one quarter, and each phase ships on its own.
The layer maps onto the NIST AI RMF core: Place does the MAP work (context, categorization, impacts), Route embeds MEASURE in every request (classification, evaluation, telemetry), Govern implements MANAGE (budgets, gates, monitoring, response), and GOVERN runs through all three phases. Every Sovereign Generator blueprint ships with this mapping filled in from your own inputs.
Expensive models fed long prompts, repeated history, and irrelevant documents. High bills, no accountability.
Frontier models doing extraction and formatting: work a small model does for pennies.
Every workload metered, even when local hardware or colocation is cheaper and more private.
Agents retry and expand context with no budget, no ceiling, no stop condition.
Employees on personal accounts. IP leakage, privacy exposure, invisible spend.
No visibility by team, workflow, or outcome. No chargeback, no discipline.
Every request is classified, compressed, gated, routed, and evaluated. The right work reaches the right intelligence (local, private, cloud, or human) at the right cost.
Every engagement is scoped to land inside a normal pilot budget, and the audit typically pays for itself in identified savings. Tell us your setup and we'll scope it.
Where should your AI run, and what will it cost? Cloud versus local versus colocation, modeled on your workloads.
Find the waste. Token usage by team, workflow, and model. Chargeback design and a 30-day savings plan.
Model routing, context compression, spend telemetry, and governance, installed inside your stack.
A governed stack for sensitive workloads. Local SLMs, private LLMs, retrieval, telemetry, and human approvals.
Every tool below runs the same models we use in paid engagements. They are deterministic, sourced, and free to break. Start anywhere; they chain: size the workload, price the placement, test the readiness, brief the board.
Five questions (use case, sensitivity, scale, priority, budget) and you get a complete sovereign deployment blueprint: the model stack, the hardware, the routing doctrine, TCO against frontier cloud, and the purchase gates that stop you buying on roadmaps.
Generate your blueprintCloud vs owned vs hybrid over 36 months: break-even months, the savings wedge, and a link that carries your model into the budget thread.
Eighteen questions, four minutes: overall readiness, private-AI feasibility, sovereign maturity, and your shadow-AI exposure, scored live.
The TCO briefing for CFOs, the Coherence Field Guide for CIOs, and the 90-day cost-governance playbook. The paper trail behind the tools.
The pressure is universal: sensitive data, runaway spend, ungoverned access. The answer is specific. Pick an industry to see how we deploy private models, security, and cost discipline where it actually matters.
Clinical notes, prior-auth, and coding are begging to be automated, but nothing can touch a public model under HIPAA. We make private inference the default and gate the rest.
On-prem and private SLMs for clinical summarization, coding, and prior-auth triage. PHI stays inside your boundary and nothing leaves for a public API.
Least-privilege access per department, immutable audit trails, and mandatory human sign-off on anything clinical or diagnostic.
A TCO audit scoped to a HIPAA boundary, then a private intelligence stack that keeps sensitive workloads local and cloud reserved for the non-sensitive tail.
Token spend scales with every transaction, and examiners want to know exactly which model touched which decision. Routing and audit aren't optional here.
SLM-first routing for fraud triage, document extraction, and KYC. Frontier models stay gated, logged, and reserved for the genuinely hard reasoning.
Model-access tiers, data-residency boundaries, and immutable decision logs an examiner can walk through line by line.
A spend & token audit with chargeback by desk, then a governed routing layer that caps cost per decision without slowing the business.
Thousands of knowledge workers, shadow AI on personal accounts, and client-confidential matter data flowing to who-knows-where. Ethical walls have to be enforced, not trusted.
Matter-scoped private models for review, drafting, and research. Nothing crosses a client boundary or trains a public model.
Ethical walls encoded as least-privilege gates, per-matter access, and retention controls that satisfy client audits.
A shadow-AI amnesty to surface real usage, then a private stack and 90-day governance rollout that make the sanctioned path the easy one.
Citizen data, procurement scrutiny, and a mandate that no single vendor can hold you hostage. AI here has to be auditable and, often, air-gapped.
Sovereign and air-gapped SLMs running on owned or colocated hardware, with no hard dependency on a single hyperscaler.
Zero-trust access, complete audit trails, and human escalation on any high-impact or citizen-facing decision.
A sovereign deployment blueprint plus a cloud-vs-owned-vs-colo TCO model that stands up to procurement review.
Uptime-critical operations, proprietary designs, and plant data that shouldn't traverse the public internet. The economics favor the edge, as long as it's governed.
Local inference at the edge and on-prem for design, maintenance, and process knowledge. IP-sensitive data stays on your network.
Hard network boundaries between OT and IT, least-privilege tool access, and stop conditions on any automated loop touching production.
An edge/colocation TCO model, then a private stack that turns tribal plant knowledge into a governed, queryable asset.
AI is in the product and in the burn rate. Frontier-model overkill on routine features is the fastest way to watch gross margin evaporate as you scale.
SLM-first routing for in-product AI features, with frontier models reserved for the genuinely hard reasoning users actually pay for.
Per-tenant boundaries, hard budget ceilings, and governed agent loops that can't run the meter unattended.
A token-spend optimization audit and a routing-plus-telemetry layer that protects margin as usage, and the bill, keep climbing.
Every industry gets the same discipline: private where it must be, gated everywhere, and costed against your real numbers. Named references are shared under NDA.
AI consulting for business outcomes: we decide where AI should run and what it should cost, then automate and modernize the workflows around it: sovereign AI, cost control, workforce and workflow automation, process and resource optimization, and business development. Audits, implementation, and a managed operating layer.
Routine work runs on small, specialized private models with narrow jobs and budgets. Frontier LLMs are reserved for deep reasoning and escalation.
Tools report numbers. We replace assumptions with your workload, hardware, and pricing data, then answer the board-level question with a break-even model and a roadmap.
No. Leadership, strategy, judgment, and relationships stay human. AI is the amplifier, not the strategy.
A twenty-minute call. Most clients begin with the TCO Audit, which typically pays for itself in identified savings.
Yes. Much of our work is with owner-led and mid-market companies. The same audit, automation, and modernization work scales down cleanly: scoped to a pilot budget, savings identified before you commit to anything bigger, and no enterprise IT department required on your side.
Twenty minutes, no pitch deck. Pick a time below and bring one real workload. We'll tell you the first three things we would look at, whether or not you hire us.
The Google Meet link is available inside the calendar event.

Not ready for a call? Tell us what your AI setup looks like today and we'll reply within one business day.
hello@intelixsystems.com
Nader has spent more than 20 years running technology for businesses: AI, cloud, data centers, security, and the strategy around all of it.
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