Ask yourself this question before reading on: do you know exactly what company information your team has pasted into ChatGPT, Copilot, or any other free AI assistant in the last few weeks? Contracts, customer databases, financial reports, source code, board minutes. If the answer is "I have no idea," you're not alone: it's exactly what happens to the vast majority of companies today, and it has a name in the industry: shadow AI.
The problem is not that your team uses artificial intelligence. The problem is that they use it without control, sending confidential information to third-party servers whose data usage policies—and in many cases, their role in training future models—the company never read or approved.
The real dilemma: ban AI or lose control of your data
Faced with this risk, many companies react in the worst possible way: blocking access to AI tools by internal policy. The result is almost never that the problem disappears; it's that employees continue using it from their personal phones, now completely outside the company's visibility.
The right alternative isn't choosing between "AI productivity" or "data control". It is bringing private AI and generative models into your own infrastructure, where the rest of your corporate information already lives.
Nextcloud Assistant: Generative AI that never leaves your server
If your company has already migrated—or is evaluating migrating—to a private cloud with Nextcloud, there is an additional layer that very few companies know about yet: Nextcloud Assistant. It is an open-source artificial intelligence assistant integrated directly into the main Nextcloud Hub dashboard and applications like the document editor and corporate email. With this, you maintain your data sovereignty intact without sacrificing innovation.