Local AI

Can a laptop do your company's AI work without sending a single byte outside? Luca De Giglio ran real travel-business tasks on a MacBook Pro with 48 GB of RAM, using the open-weight Qwen 3.8 27B model, and compared every answer with Claude Opus 5.5 through the API.On everyday tasks (reading a booking email, replying to a bad review, pricing a tour package) the local model matched Claude, at about a fifth of the speed and a fraction of the cost, and the data never left the laptop. On a 30-page supplier contract it still found the right cancellation charge, but in six minutes instead of sixteen seconds. On 600 bookings checked against a hotel invoice, it hit a wall.Then the questions that matter for a company: why more RAM is not enough, what actually fits on a laptop, why buying a machine is a bet, who maintains it, and where local AI makes sense in travel and hospitality.IN THIS EPISODE• Three light tests and two heavy tests: local vs. the Claude API.• Why a 64 GB server can be useless