A small AI on your computer: what to hand it over a work week
A week of office tasks shows, case by case, what fits a local model and what calls for a remote service.
Short answer: classify the task, not the whole tool. Short routines with information that should not leave the computer tend to fit a small local model. Long jobs or ones that need broad knowledge tend to do better on a remote service.
Paulo's week
Paulo is an office assistant at a small firm and tested a local model on his laptop over five working days. For each task, he noted where he ran it and whether the result was useful.
- Monday. Fixing the spelling of emails to clients. He ran it on the local model, and the result was good.
- Tuesday. Summarizing internal meeting minutes with client data. He ran it on the local model, and the result was acceptable, with his review.
- Wednesday. Sorting 40 incoming messages by subject. He ran it on the local model, and it worked well.
- Thursday. Drafting a long proposal comparing three suppliers. It went to a remote service, without confidential data, because the local model lost the thread of the text.
- Friday. Understanding a rule in an industry he did not know. It went to a remote service, with a check against an official source, because the small model answered vaguely.
The pattern that emerged
The local tasks were short, repetitive and involved internal information. The remote ones were long or depended on broad knowledge. Neither option solved the week on its own.
How to repeat the test in your case
- List five real tasks from your week.
- Mark the ones that involve data that cannot leave the device. They only go to a remote service if your company or school policy allows it.
- Run the simple tasks on the local model and compare them with your own quality standard.
- Note what you had to redo and how long it took.
- Repeat for a week before deciding.
Limits
Small models make more mistakes on hard tasks, and any model can be wrong, so review the result. Running locally does not guarantee confidentiality if the app logs what you type, so check the settings. For personal or confidential data, follow your organization's policy. This text is general information.
