Cloud vs Local: Deployment Decisions for Small Teams
From Robert “Bobby” Hayes’s guide series Small Business AI Toolkit: Smart Model Selection Without the Technical Overhead.
This is chapter 4 of the series. See the complete guide for the full picture, or work through the chapters in sequence.
The deployment decision you make today will determine whether your AI investment becomes a strategic advantage or an operational nightmare. After mastering model selection and prompt engineering from previous chapters, you now face a critical fork in the road: deploy your AI models in the cloud or run them locally on your own infrastructure. This choice affects everything from your monthly costs and security posture to your ability to scale and maintain your AI systems.