A practical framework for evaluating AI vendors and tools for an Australian business.
dgm is an independent osFoundry integration partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC), and dgm has no completed client integrations yet.
Choosing AI vendors and tools is easier with a clear framework. Here is a practical one for Australian businesses.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Model choice | BYOK and model-agnostic, or locked to one vendor? |
| Deployment | Cloud, self-host, or local — can it meet residency? |
| Pricing | Usage-based or per-seat? |
| Auditability | Can it produce an audit trail and meet your sector’s rules? |
The criteria that matter
Four questions decide most: Can I bring my own model and key (or am I locked in)? Can I deploy it to meet residency? Is pricing usage-based or per-seat? And can it produce an audit trail for my compliance obligations?
Beyond the demo
Test on your real data and workflow, not the vendor’s demo. Check support, security posture and exit options — for APRA-regulated firms, vendor risk is a CPS 230 obligation.
Making the choice
Favour options you can assess, audit and exit. osFoundry is a model-agnostic, bring-your-own-key (BYOK) AI orchestration platform — usage-based pricing with no per-seat fees, local-first and self-hostable, with per-region data pinning (US, EU or Japan) or deployment into your own cloud. osFoundry’s managed cloud pins data to the US, EU or Japan — it does not currently offer an Australian managed region. For data that must stay in Australia, the honest path is self-hosting osFoundry (BYO Cloud) inside an Australian cloud region such as AWS (Sydney or Melbourne), Microsoft Azure (Australia East, Australia Southeast or Australia Central in Canberra) or Google Cloud (Sydney or Melbourne), or running models locally on-device.
Where dgm fits
dgm is an independent integration partner that helps Australian businesses adopt osFoundry — scoping a first use case, handling the build, and connecting AI to the systems you already run. dgm is independent of osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has no completed client integrations yet, so everything described here is a service offered, not a past result. If you want to scope a practical first project, dgm can help you map it out.