Article: Local-First AI Inference: A Cloud Architecture Pattern for Cost-Effective Document Processing (opens in new tab)

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. By Obinna Iheanachor