Article: Local-First AI Inference: A Cloud Architecture Pattern for Cost-Effective Document Processing

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InfoQ

The Local-First AI Inference pattern routes 70–80 of documents to deterministic local extraction at zero API cost, reserving Azure OpenAI calls for edge cases and flagging low-confidence results for human review. Deployed on 4,700 engineering drawing PDFs, it cut API costs by 75 and processing time by 55, while bounding errors through a human review tier.