Almost everything written about AI and European data protection assumes the GDPR, and in Switzerland that assumption is wrong. Switzerland is not in the EU and not in the EEA. The revised Federal Act on Data Protection governs, supervised by the FDPIC, and it differs from the GDPR in ways that change both the architecture and who is personally exposed if it goes wrong. This is the one page on this site where the legal regime, rather than the industry mix, is the reason it exists.
The Swiss constraint has one enormous engineering consequence, and it is worth stating before the sector detail, because it decides most designs here.
In-country cloud capacity exists: at the time of writing there are hyperscale regions in Zurich from Google and Microsoft, while the largest provider by market share has no Swiss region at all, which quietly forces a platform decision on organisations that had assumed they had already made one. But regional capacity is not the same as model availability. The hosted frontier models are generally not offered from Swiss regions, so a project that must keep client identifying data inside Switzerland frequently cannot use them — not because of a policy objection, but because there is nowhere to send the request. The answer is usually a self-hosted open-weight model running on infrastructure the institution controls, which is a real trade: current open-weight models are behind the best hosted ones on the hardest reasoning tasks, and ahead on every question about where the data went. We would rather measure that gap on your documents than debate it in the abstract. The options are set out under on-premise AI and open-weight models.
Private banking and wealth management supply the majority of the document work: client files, onboarding and due diligence packs, suitability assessments, correspondence in three or four languages. The valuable system reads the file, assembles the evidence, cites where each fact came from and leaves the judgement with the relationship manager. It never leaves the bank.
Insurance and reinsurance bring claims and treaty documents at volume, with the same secrecy pressure in a milder form and a much greater tolerance for volume-driven automation.
Pharmaceutical and life sciences groups along the Zurich axis bring regulatory and research documentation, where traceability to source matters more than fluency; that work is described under life sciences research.
Commodities and trading firms, many of them a short train ride away in Zug, bring contract and shipping documentation with a strong preference for keeping everything in one jurisdiction, which usually resolves the same way as the banking work. The regulated decisioning patterns behind all of it are under financial services.
No. We have one office and it is in Barcelona. We travel to Zurich for discovery, for on-site document review and for handover. We are an EU company working with Swiss clients, which we would rather state plainly, because for a Swiss institution the location of its supplier is a question with legal weight rather than a marketing detail.
Usually both, for different parts of what you do. The revised Federal Act on Data Protection applies because you are in Switzerland; the GDPR applies to activity directed at people in the EU, and many Zurich firms have plenty of it. They are similar enough that one well-built system can satisfy both and different enough that the documentation has to be written against each. The differences that matter to a build are the breach-notification standard, the register requirements, and the fact that Swiss transfer rules run off the Federal Council's own list of adequate states rather than the EU's. Your counsel owns the analysis; we build so that it has as little to analyse as possible.
Storage, retrieval and compute, yes — there are hyperscale regions in Zurich, and self-hosting inside your own infrastructure is always available. Hosted frontier models are the genuine exception: at the time of writing they are generally not served from Swiss regions, so keeping client identifying data in-country usually means running an open-weight model on hardware you control. That is a capability trade-off rather than a compliance one, and it should be measured on your own documents before anyone commits to it. Model and region availability changes, so confirm the current position with the provider rather than relying on this page.
Not directly, because Switzerland is not in the EU or the EEA. It reaches you in two ways nonetheless: if you place a system on the EU market, and if the output produced by your system is used in the EU. For a Zurich bank with EU clients or an EU branch, that is a live question rather than a theoretical one. Switzerland's own direction has been towards sector-specific regulation rather than a single horizontal AI act, alongside its signature of the Council of Europe framework convention on artificial intelligence, but this is still moving and is a question for your counsel, not for an engineering firm's location page.
Our ranges are on the pricing page, in euros and exclusive of VAT, and we do not price by postcode. We can invoice in Swiss francs. What genuinely raises the number here is not the city but the deployment model: a self-hosted build inside a closed environment carries infrastructure work and a slower evaluation loop that a hosted one does not, and we scope that separately rather than hiding it in a day rate.
Thirty minutes on what has to stay inside, and what is actually achievable within that boundary.
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What we built, what stage it is at, and a link to the live thing wherever there is one.
yourOS is an operating system with an AI at its heart. You talk to it like a person, out loud or typed. It makes your calls, plans your days and works on your projects with a crew of agents, on your own private server. Our own product, built from the first commit; the waitlist is open.
Website, backend and app assets for Sonora, a free AI sound-therapy app on iOS and Android published by Cognitive AI.
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In closed beta: Roxy, a private AI assistant with permanent memory running on infrastructure the user owns. Brand, site, product, backend and conversational design.
Live at coherence.com: brand identity generated with AI agents we directed, the motion system and website for the group behind Sonora, AboutAI, WakeUp and MudShadows. Agent work remains in build.
Live at domainbooth.com for DomainBooth, a premium domain brokerage: a new animated mark, every page redesigned and rebuilt with designed mobile layouts, and a custom CMS for its sales record, featured names, press and enquiries.
Apps, platforms and campaigns for these teams, long before the AI work. Every one is written up on the work page — what we did, and where our part ended.
