Where your data actually sits.

The most common first question we get from buyers in Australia is not about the model. It is not about the prompt. It is about where the data sits. Which jurisdiction. Which cloud region. Who, in the worst case, would receive a subpoena.

We treat the answer the way an in-house legal team would. The AI employee runs against an Australian-region deployment, with model calls routed to providers that have signed appropriate data-handling commitments — or routed to a region the customer has specifically approved. Conversation logs, drafts and memory sit in storage the customer controls, or in a region the customer has signed off on. The default is simple: no data leaves the country we agreed on without an audit trail.

Three concrete shapes this takes in practice:

• A configurable region for every workflow — Sydney, Melbourne, or the customer’s preferred Australian provider — set before the employee writes its first draft.
• Memory and approval logs in customer-owned storage, retained on the customer’s schedule, not ours. If they archive after ninety days, so do we.
• A signed DPA before any new tool is added to the employee’s stack. New integration, new approval. No quiet expansion of the data perimeter.

We have watched buyers cancel pilots from overseas-led agent vendors over this exact question. The cancellation is not because the model leaked something. It is because the vendor could not produce a clean answer in fifteen minutes when the customer’s legal team asked. Legal does not buy "we are SOC 2." Legal buys "your conversations sit in your AWS account in ap-southeast-2, and here is the IAM policy that says so."

The pattern in the AI category is going to mirror what happened with cloud in the late 2010s. Buyers will accept overseas-routed models for non-sensitive workflows. They will not accept overseas storage of customer conversations, contract drafts or employee memos. The vendors that can answer the residency question on the first call will win the regulated work.

For us, this is not a feature. It is a precondition. We do not ship a workflow until the residency question is closed. The employee comes online once the legal team has signed the perimeter, not before.