With OwnBrain you use AI without sharing your company data. YourData Network now offers OwnBrain: local AI for organisations that work with confidential information, from notaries and law firms to healthcare practices, municipalities and SMEs. Users ask their questions in a chat, just as they would in ChatGPT or Copilot, but the AI runs in your own office, on equipment you own.
Company data quietly ends up with AI services
In a short time, AI has become an important tool in the office. Employees use AI services to answer a client email, summarise a contract, rewrite a quote or write up the minutes of a meeting. Whether they use a business account or their own personal one, whatever they enter goes to the provider of that service. As a result, client and employee data, conversations, confidential case files and more are shared with an outside party on a large scale.
Often this happens out of sight of the organisation. In the Netherlands, almost half of all employees use a personal account with an AI service for work. More than a third use AI without their employer’s permission. At the end of last year, the Dutch Data Protection Authority warned about the growing number of data breaches caused by employees entering sensitive information into public AI chatbots. In 2025 the regulator received dozens of reports of such incidents.
You hand over control of your data
This matters even more for some organisations. Notaries and lawyers have a duty of confidentiality. Healthcare providers, municipalities and other public bodies handle sensitive data about patients and residents. They all have to be able to account for what happens to that data. But even without a duty of confidentiality, the question is whether you simply want to entrust your confidential company data to a third party.
An employee pastes a client file into a chat service. From that moment on, it sits with another company, often an American one. That provider decides how long it is kept and who can access it. Whether you can get it back is out of your hands. On top of that, an American provider falls under the CLOUD Act: the US authorities can demand that data, even when it is stored in Europe.
More and more organisations want to become digitally independent
Shifting geopolitical relations in recent years have raised awareness that it pays to depend less on a handful of large tech companies. Organisations want to decide for themselves again where their data is stored and who can access it. According to ABN AMRO’s Cybertrends report 2026, around two thirds of Dutch organisations are taking action to reduce their dependence on American cloud and AI providers. Among small and medium-sized businesses, 17 per cent have already moved to European providers. And 82 per cent of the organisations surveyed in the Benelux feel that American tech companies have too much power over data and AI.
OwnBrain brings AI into your own office
For organisations that take this seriously, there is now OwnBrain. OwnBrain is a complete AI installation: the equipment, the AI models and secure access. We place OwnBrain in your office, set it up and teach your users how to work with it. This also helps with the AI literacy the EU AI Act requires. The equipment is yours, not rented.
Users log in through their browser with their own account and ask their questions in the chat. OwnBrain looks for the answer in your own case files, manuals and procedures. Every answer shows its source. OwnBrain can also draft letters, summarise documents and translate. Each user only gets answers from files they can access themselves. What goes in stays within your organisation, unless you choose otherwise. Already using Nextcloud with YourData Network? OwnBrain works most easily with it.
Your own AI is one step; independence takes your whole workplace
OwnBrain is an important step: your confidential data stays with you, even when you use AI. But it is only part of the story. As long as your files are stored with large cloud services and your laptops and phones run on operating systems from large tech companies, much of your confidential data still sits with others.
That is why YourData Network sets up the entire workplace so that you own your data in every part of it. That is the Sovereign Digital Workplace:
- Nextcloud for files, collaboration and communication
- Email and calendar in your own environment with Grommunio, as an alternative to Exchange
- Laptops running Linux Mint
- Privacy-friendly smartphones
- All of this on your own nodes or on reserved capacity in the decentralised network
In the offices I visit, the conversation turns to AI more and more often. They want to use it, but their case files don’t belong with an online AI service. With OwnBrain I can show them they no longer have to choose: the AI simply runs in their own office.
Robert Jan Lamers, co-founder of YourData Network
What OwnBrain can do now and what is coming
OwnBrain is new and is being developed further. This is what you can expect today:
- Strong at: questions about your own documents, drafting texts, summarising and translating.
- Less strong at: complex reasoning.
- Digital documents: OwnBrain reads documents with digital text, such as Word files and digital PDFs. It cannot yet read scanned documents or text in images. A trial with your own documents shows in advance how much of your archive OwnBrain can already use.
- Source with every answer: so you can check an answer straight away.
- Management and updates: for a fixed monthly fee we keep OwnBrain up to date, with new AI models, features and security updates. We test every update before rolling it out. Support hours are included. Prefer to manage it yourself? That is possible too.
- What we see: only measurements, such as temperature and disk health. Never the content of your documents or questions. A data processing agreement sets out what we may and may not do.
More features are on the way, such as calculations in Excel and CSV, comparing case files, searching scanned documents, taking minutes of meetings, creating images and an app for the OwnPhone. With management and updates you get them automatically.
OwnBrain is also being developed in practice. YourData Network takes part in the SOLID project, in which a digital workplace with local AI is being tested, with the municipality of Valkenburg aan de Geul and the law firm Jouw Advocaten as test partners.
Discover what OwnBrain can do for your organisation
On the OwnBrain page you can read which editions are available, what is always included and how an installation works. You can also request a free price estimate there.