A field-service team learns the hard way
A field-service team built a support chatbot that sent every message to a cloud LLM endpoint. The design held until a technician drove through a tunnel, and the request queue grew into an eleven-minute backlog. The same week, a support ticket containing a customer's account number appeared in a third-party log because the payload was never classified. The fix was not a bigger cloud budget but a local-first router that decides where each request runs.
Why cloud-first fails in three specific ways
Latency is the first failure mode, because a round trip to a hosted endpoint adds network time on top of model time. Autocomplete-style features feel broken when every keystroke waits for a distant server instead of a local process. Secrets are the second failure, because any payload sent to a third party can leak into logs or vendor systems. Offline is the third, because a tablet in a tunnel simply has no route to the cloud.
The decision table that replaces the either-or debate
