Most discussions about local AI focus on one thing: Can the language model run locally? That matters, but for document AI it is only one part of the system. If the goal is to analyze PDFs, search contracts, extract information from scanned forms, or answer questions over internal documents, then “local AI” is not just a local LLM. It is a full document intelligence pipeline. A fully local document AI system usually requires three major layers: OCR / document parsing Retrieval / RAG Local AI inference If any of these layers depends on external APIs, the system is not truly local. Local inference alone is not enough Running a model with Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, or GPT4All is useful. It gives you a local reasoning engine. But documents are not clean prompts.…