ChatGPT Enterprise vs on-premise AI: an honest comparison.
ChatGPT Enterprise is the business tier of the most widely used AI product on earth, and for many organisations it is a sensible choice. This page sets out what OpenAI genuinely gets right, what an Australian professional practice still needs to weigh, and where a no-egress unit like Dominion is a different category rather than a competitor. Every claim about OpenAI below links to their own published documentation.
What OpenAI gets right
- No training on your data by default. OpenAI states plainly that business data from ChatGPT Enterprise and the API is not used to train its models unless you opt in (OpenAI enterprise privacy).
- Real security posture. SOC 2 Type 2 audited, encryption in transit and at rest, admin controls and SSO (OpenAI trust portal).
- Australian data residency at rest. Eligible Enterprise customers can now have customer content stored at rest in Australia (OpenAI data residency).
- Frontier capability. On open-ended general reasoning, frontier cloud models lead anything that runs locally. We say the same thing on every page of this site.
What residency at rest does not change
Storage location and processing are different questions. Your prompts and documents are still transmitted to and processed on OpenAI's infrastructure, and OpenAI is a US company subject to US legal process such as the CLOUD Act wherever the data sits. For a business whose obligations turn on disclosure to a third party, the analysis is about transmission and access, not about which country the disk is in and not about training policy. "Not trained on" and "never transmitted" are different promises.
Side by side
| ChatGPT Enterprise | Dominion | |
|---|---|---|
| Trains on your data | No, by default | Impossible: nothing leaves your building |
| Where work is processed | OpenAI infrastructure; AU storage at rest available | On the unit in your office |
| Jurisdiction over the provider | United States | Australia; the hardware is on your premises |
| Model capability | Frontier models | Strong open models, tuned to your business by ErmosIQ |
| Cost model | Per seat, by sales negotiation | Per unit, sized to your practice: our cost page |
| How you verify the security claim | Provider documentation and audits | Stand in your server room and look at it |
Dominion is priced per unit, per month on a 12-month term, sized to your practice: unlimited users, no per-user licences, no usage charges. Exact pricing is confirmed in the scoping consultation.
Which one fits
If your compliance position permits client material to be processed by an offshore provider under contract, ChatGPT Enterprise is a capable, well-run product. Dominion exists for practices where that position fails: where privilege, health information rules or professional confidentiality mean the defensible answer is that client data does not leave the premises at all. Some businesses run both: cloud AI for general work, the unit for anything touching client matters.
Common questions
Does ChatGPT Enterprise train on our data?
Where is ChatGPT Enterprise data processed?
Is ChatGPT Enterprise compliant with the Privacy Act?
Can we use both ChatGPT Enterprise and Dominion?
See Dominion answering from your own documents.
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