Case study · Brisbane manufacturing · Client name confidential
Local AI paid for itself in under four months
An anonymised ~25-person CNC manufacturer in Brisbane’s north kept decades of job data on-site — and turned it into quoting speed, less downtime, and six-figure annual savings.
Where the money went — and came back
Investment was a one-off hardware and deployment cost. Returns showed up in labour, machine availability, and bid capacity — not in another monthly AI subscription.
Before local AI
- Complex quote prep~4 hours
- Unplanned CNC downtimeBaseline cost
- Senior staff as “walking wiki”Constant interruptions
- Cloud AI for shop IPRisk + usage fees
After local AI
- Complex quote prep~20 minutes
- Unplanned downtime−45%
- Knowledge interruptions−70%
- Production data locationStays on-site
Annual value unlocked
Relative scale of benefits reported ~6 months after go-live (illustrative mix for this engagement).
Against a capital outlay of roughly $8,000–$12,000 for hardware and setup.
payback
What we deployed
On-site hardware
Dual-GPU workstation class build sized for private inference — not a recurring cloud meter.
Private knowledge base
RAG over CNC logs, PDFs, and job history. Operators ask in plain language; answers stay on the LAN.
Shop-floor access
Chat and optional voice on tablets so people running machines are not hunting network shares.
“Our data is now our superpower, not a burden. No more cloud worries for our IP.”— Operations leadership, client name withheld
Full write-up: download the whitepaper (Markdown). Outcomes are engagement-specific and not a guarantee for every site.
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