Can a public office work one day without its AI vendor? A test in four questions
AI supports the work of public offices more and more, and that is very good. It is just worth knowing what happens when the tool a department relies on suddenly stops working. An office’s digital sovereignty starts with a simple test: can we work one day without our AI vendor?
This is the second post in the series AI in public administration: the last mile. In part 1 we wrote about Polish language models and the road to the civil servant’s desk. Today: how to secure business continuity and the freedom to choose a vendor.
Monday, 7:55 a.m., the local tax department
Ewa (a fictional character) has been preparing replies to appeals with an AI assistant for a year. On Monday at 7:55 a.m. she sees a message: service unavailable. Maybe it is an outage. Maybe the vendor has changed its licence terms or prices. Or maybe the decision was made eight thousand kilometres away.
For Ewa, the cause does not matter. What matters is whether the office keeps working. That question is best answered today, calmly, at a desk.
The one-day-without-your-AI-vendor test
Any head of office can run it in an hour. Four questions are enough.
1. Will work stop? AI really helps. In the British experiment we described in part 1, 82% of civil servants did not want to go back to working without the assistant (GOV.UK). The better a tool works, the more important it is that it is always available.
2. Where is the data and who can access it? Krystyna (a fictional character) is waiting for a decision on her benefit. She did not choose her office’s AI vendor, but it is her data in the letter. An office that keeps data in-house can simply guarantee her that.
3. Do we have a plan B? Poland’s amended National Cybersecurity System Act, implementing the NIS2 directive, has applied since 3 April 2026 and requires managing supplier risk and business continuity. According to the Ministry of Digital Affairs, the entities covered have until 3 April 2027 to implement these obligations. Banks have had similar requirements under the DORA regulation since January 2025. A good business continuity plan for public administration now covers AI as well.
4. Can we switch vendors without rebuilding? If the prompts, settings and knowledge of the office live in a single foreign service, switching vendors means starting from scratch. That is vendor lock-in. If the model is replaceable and the data and event logs stay in-house, switching vendors is a matter of configuration.
Why it is worth running this test now
Outages and price changes can happen to anyone. The last two years have also shown that access to AI technology can depend on the decisions of a foreign state.
- Chips in the second tier. In January 2025, the US administration announced the AI Diffusion Rule, export rules for the most advanced AI chips. Eighteen allies received full access, while Poland was placed in the “second tier” with a cap of around 50,000 GPUs. In May 2025, the new administration stopped enforcing the rule. The episode showed, however, that access to the foundations of AI can be decided by someone else.
- An answer before the Senate. In June 2025, the French Senate asked a representative of Microsoft France whether he could guarantee that French institutions’ data would not be handed to US authorities without France’s consent. Anton Carniaux replied: “No, I cannot guarantee that. But it has never happened before.” This does not mean data goes there routinely. It means the vendor cannot rule it out.
- The prosecutor’s mailbox. After US sanctions on International Criminal Court staff, media reported that prosecutor Karim Khan had lost access to his work email. Microsoft denies suspending services, so the facts remain disputed. The Court has nonetheless announced a change of provider.
European administrations are already acting. Denmark’s Ministry of Digital Affairs is moving to LibreOffice, and Schleswig-Holstein is building a “digitally sovereign workplace” on open-source software. The EU-US data transfer framework survived before the EU General Court in September 2025, but the case has been appealed to the Court of Justice of the EU, which struck down the two previous such agreements.
Digital sovereignty, floor by floor
Yes, GPUs are American. Over 80% of the digital technologies used in Europe are imported, and about 70% of the world’s AI models were developed in the US (Bertelsmann Stiftung). Sovereignty does not mean self-sufficiency in everything. It means control where control is possible, and in AI it is possible on three of four floors:
| Floor | What the office can control | How |
|---|---|---|
| Chips | Hardware in its own server room | Purchased GPUs stay in the office; no one can switch them off remotely like a cloud account |
| Models | Full control | Open models run in-house: Bielik under the Apache 2.0 licence and PLLuM. They run locally, even without internet, and compressed Bielik 11B takes about 9 GB and fits on a single GPU |
| Platform | Full control | Software with source code held by the contracting authority, a Polish vendor, Polish jurisdiction |
| Data and logs | Full control | On the office’s servers or in a sovereign cloud in Poland |
Global platforms now offer “sovereign clouds” and on-premises versions. That is a step in the right direction. The vendors themselves admit, however, that they do not fully remove legal risk: AWS did not rule out US authorities’ access to its European sovereign cloud, and Microsoft has said that it would go to court if ordered to suspend services in Europe. Read more about open Polish models in our guide Bielik and PLLuM in companies and public offices.
Offline AI: a Polish stack that always works
On three floors Poland already has the building blocks. What was missing was the layer that turns them into a secure work tool for a public office. We have built that layer in SAIE. An office can run it in three ways:
- as a service in a data centre in Poland or the EU;
- on its own servers;
- in air-gap mode, in a network fully cut off from the internet, with local models, including Polish ones.
Every query passes through the PROXY:AI gateway, which masks personal data, decides which model may work on which data and keeps an immutable audit trail. The model can be replaced without rebuilding the system, and the source code stays with the client. How to deploy AI without internet access and how we protect data is described on our Deployment and security page.
Back to the test. On Monday at 7:55 a.m., Ewa works with her local assistant as on any other day. Krystyna’s data stays in Poland. And the head of office shows the auditor a continuity plan in which switching the model vendor is a matter of configuration.
Digital sovereignty at the 2nd Forum on AI in Public Administration
Digital sovereignty and business continuity are among the topics we will discuss at the 2nd Forum on AI in Public Administration in Wrocław (4-6 November 2026). We are a Special Partner of the Forum, and on 5 November, in our talk “SAIE in a public office”, we will show an assistant that answers from the office’s BIP pages, resolutions and procedures. See Forum details.
AI training for public offices
The one-day-without-your-vendor test is best run with a team that understands how AI works. Our AI workshops for the public sector help civil servants and managers prepare for such decisions. See our training offer.
Summary
A public office’s digital sovereignty does not require Polish chips. It requires models, a platform and data under its own control, and Poland has all of that today. The one-day-without-your-AI-vendor test can be run as a desk exercise. It is worth doing now.