Public ChatGPT or Private AI: Which to Choose for Your Business?
Individual ChatGPT accounts, professional Team plans, or a dedicated private instance: three very different approaches to bringing AI into the workplace. A comparative analysis.
Three paths are open to a company wishing to equip its employees with generative AI: letting everyone use a personal ChatGPT account, subscribing to a shared professional offering like ChatGPT Team, or deploying a dedicated private instance. These options differ radically in terms of data control, customisation, and compliance.
The first option, letting things run their course, is the most widespread and the most risky. Personal accounts escape any company control: no visibility on submitted data, no data retention policy, and consumer terms of use that may allow the exploitation of conversations. In the event of an audit or dispute, the company can neither document nor prove anything.
The second option, the shared professional plan, brings real guarantees: data is no longer used to train models, and administration is centralised. Its limitations are structural: data remains hosted in the United States with a provider subject to US law, contract and billing are in dollars, support is English-only, and the company is limited to the models of a single provider.
The third option, the dedicated private instance, reverses the logic: instead of sending your teams to a model provider's platform, you deploy your own interface that consumes open-source models in the background. Your conversations, files, and histories are stored on your instance, in the country of your choice. You activate the models you want (Llama, Qwen, Mixtral, or DeepSeek) and switch models without changing your tool or depending on a proprietary player.
For a Swiss business, a private instance hosted in Switzerland offers specific advantages: native compliance with the FADP (LPD), data out of direct reach of the US CLOUD Act, a contract under Swiss law, invoicing in CHF with Swiss VAT, and support in French. Custom branding and a dedicated domain also strengthen internal adoption: employees use "the company tool," not an external service.
The choice ultimately depends on your risk exposure. A business processing no sensitive data can manage with a shared offering. As soon as you handle client data, financial, medical, or legal information, or when your clients ask for guarantees on your subcontractors, a sovereign private instance becomes the rational choice, and its additional cost is marginal compared to the stakes involved.