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ZenAI: Solving the challenge of secure, scalable enterprise AI

Unlocking AI’s full potential on an enterprise level requires more than choosing the right model. With ZenAI, we deliver a secure, flexible accelerator that embeds AI seamlessly into your team’s everyday workflows, built for scale, control, and trust.

7 minutes to read
With insights from...
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Dr. sc. ETH David M. Sommer

Lead Security Consultant
Zühlke Dominic Böni

Dominic Böni

Business Development Manager

  • Zühlke’s ZenAI provides a secure pathway for AI democratisation, enabling the creation and use of AI agents and agentic workflows
  • Data integrations beyond Reality Augmented Generation (RAG) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support allow high quality data retrieval and real time integrations
  • Provider-agnostic AI models and hosting let IT departments comply with their unique data and security needs 

AI that helps with everyday tasks across your entire organisation – securely and at scale? Meet ZenAI.   

Generative AI (GenAI) has immense potential to optimise day-to-day operations. But, in practice, challenges like strict data regulations, security concerns, high licensing costs, organisational readiness and platform lock-in keep most companies from harnessing GenAI’s full power. 

That’s why we created ZenAI: a business-ready, on-site GenAI solution that integrates naturally into existing workflows, without requiring prompt knowledge or technical know-how. It runs locally or behind your firewall, making it ideal for organisations who require strict data and compliance control. 

Originally developed at Zühlke to empower our own teams, it quickly became clear that ZenAI had value for any organisation in need of generative AI solutions and is now being used by clients in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.

Enterprise AI’s adoption challenges

While working closely with enterprise clients across sectors, we’ve seen a clear, shared demand for secure and scalable GenAI solutions. 

For GenAI to be successful, it must deliver value across a wide range of processes – and for hundreds of employees – while ensuring compliance with data regulations, maintaining data security and meeting quality standards. So, despite GenAI’s promise to boost efficiency, many enterprises struggle to adopt it at scale.

Common challenges here include: 

  • Data privacy and security

    • Personal data: Processing any kind of personal data (like emails or customer data) often requires legal contracts with each data processor due to data protection regulations like GDPR.
    • Access control: Granting access to processed and available data through AI Agents (as with RAG technology) requires the same level of access controls as the existing systems.
    • Sensitive data: Sensitive data is at risk of leaving the company and being used for model training. 

  • Business limitations

    • Licensing costs: Expensive per-user licensing models limit availability.
    • Maintenance: Need for continuous process adaptation.
    • Specific user needs: Users have ideas but lack the option to build or adopt AI use cases for their specific needs. 

  • Scalability

    • Allowed data: Most current solutions do not allow process-sensitive or personal data due to missing privacy guarantees.
    • Silos: Use case-specific AI solutions are isolated and hard to maintain.
    • Cross-platform: Existing tools often lock companies into specific platforms. 

  • Technical limitations

    • Over-integration: Many platforms offer native integration and connectors without access restrictions. This results in overly privileged AI-agents, limiting development access and speed due to security concerns.
    • Dataflow control: Most AI platforms provide limited control over AI models and providers.
    • Limited depth: Many tools initially look and feel good, but do not provide the necessary enterprise-ready control over tools, data and agentic workflows.    

  • Organisational readiness

    • Democratisation: Many use cases require specialised domain knowledge to create.
    • User adoption: Cultural resistance to AI adoption and fear of being replaced hamper innovation.
    • AI know-how: GenAI is still a very new and fast-changing phenomenon; most people have limited experience using it. 

Put simply… While GenAI is a great enabler for progress and optimisation, becoming an AI-enabled company requires more than just deploying a handful of disconnected AI models and tools.    

Most current offerings ignore crucial requirements around data control, cultural change and close user involvement. Moreover, companies are struggling with scaling individual AI productivity gains to enterprise ones. And this is exactly where ZenAI comes in. 

Introducing ZenAI

ZenAI is an enterprise-grade generative AI solution and agentic platform designed for secure, scalable adoption across your organisation. 

ZenAI is a core building block of our Cybernetic Delivery Platform (CDP), built to accelerate the adoption of generative AI across enterprise workflows. CDP provides the modular framework for scalable, architecture-agnostic AI solutions, and ZenAI brings this to life by operationalising generative AI within your existing environment. 

While ZenAI is a building block within CDP, it doesn’t depend on it – instead acting as a standalone solution that can integrate flexibly into your existing IT landscape. 

Unlike generic tools, ZenAI is a generative AI solution that gives companies complete control over their data, allows easy creation of custom AI agents and workflows, and integrates seamlessly with existing systems. It empowers every employee to leverage AI efficiently, without compromising security or requiring extensive technical expertise.  

Crucially, that means: 

  • Enterprise-grade data privacy and security mechanisms
  • Easy-to-use, configurable AI agents and use cases
  • Scalability across multiple business processes
  • Full control over deployment conditions, data flow and data residence
  • No need to rip and replace existing infrastructure

ZenAI’s key benefits are in its customisation and focused approach to enterprise-wide scalability.

Architecture diagram of ZenAI showing integration of custom user interfaces, AI agents, cloud and local model providers, and enterprise IT systems through agentic workflows and APIs.

ZenAI’s key advantages

Enterprise-grade data protection and governance 

  • A safe, secure solution on which to scale AI in business
  • Full control over data flow with a three-stage safety system
  • Secures sensitive company data from external platforms like OpenAI
  • Role-based access control 

Tailored AI infrastructure for unique business needs 

  • A modular solution configured to specific requirements
  • Choose from multiple privacy levels and AI models
  • Deploy ZenAI where you want, including your data center
  • Integration with a range of third-party systems and platforms 

Designed for seamless adoption across teams 

  • Chat interface for conversing with AI and accessing information
  • User-friendly interface for creating AI agents
  • One-click data addition and agent creation
  • Accessible to all employees, not just technical experts  

Scalable by design, ready for enterprise complexity 

  • Become AI-enabled across multiple processes quickly
  • A standardised solution that integrates in your environment
  • Easily update, maintain and modify
  • REST API capabilities for connecting other applications
User interface mockup of ZenAI showing a secure AI chat assistant confirming on-premises data privacy and offering workflow guidance.

The best part? Tailoring ZenAI to your needs is a collaborative process. We work hand-in-hand with every client to deliver a bespoke solution shaped by their needs. 
 
Our delivery model embeds your experts directly in the process, from prompt engineering to workflow design, enabling your teams to learn by doing and take real ownership of the tools they help shape. 

This hands-on approach means our clients don’t just deploy ZenAI – they understand it, influence it, and extend it. The result is a truly bespoke generative AI solution and agentic platform that’s not only aligned with your business needs, but also a stepping stone toward AI fluency – and long-term technological democratisation across your organisation. 

The ZenAI difference: Customisation as a key for growth

ZenAI’s deeply customisable nature puts it poles apart from existing AI offerings in a few ways:

Choose your inputs

Whereas typical commercial AI tools leave businesses at the mercy of murky models, leaky data pipelines and a one-size-fits-all approach to use cases, Zen AI allows granular control over data connections and sources.

Host models locally, use private cloud solutions, or choose to plug into any of a range of commercial LLM and machine learning offerings – including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Tailored agentic workflows

Build truly agentic workflows and hyper-focused tools using a clean, centralised UI. Multi-step AI processes can be designed and deployed without any coding, letting everyone in the business tailor the ZenAI agentic platform to their department’s needs.

Full-scale integration

Integrate with, and access data from, all your existing systems (including Azure and Office 365, Confluence, Jira) – with per-user and per-team security settings that allow groups to access personalised AI tools.

User-friendly use cases

Employees from every part of the business can use a single generative AI solution to build AI workflows that work for them – from generating code to building out stories from bullet points, and from qualifying leads to running competitive analysis.

Each use case can be set to access bespoke datasets and use specific AI models, allowing ZenAI to become whatever each team makes of it – while keeping things secure by design.

On-hand expertise

Zühlke's rich industry experience – both in customer handling and technical depth – means we know how to deliver truly tailored solutions. Our experts can support you along your entire AI journey.

ZenAI’s all-in-one solution aggregates the very best of AI technology, while providing all the relevant dials and levers to let businesses ensure transparency, explainability and security.
Want to try out ZenAI?
Schedule a free demo

Cybernetic thinking: the next step on the AI journey

ZenAI is built on the core principles behind Zühlke’s pioneering AI accelerator, the Cybernetic Delivery Platform (CDP) – building AI-augmentation on top of looping systems of input, feedback and coordination between human experts.

Cybernetic thinking is our vision for the future of technological empowerment. One where human knowledge is partnered with ever-improving AI to unlock fast, scalable and meaningful change to the way we think about data architecture and the tools businesses use on a daily basis.

' Cybernetics is how you deal with uncertainty. AI is how you do it much faster.

Put them together – and expectations become results. '
Tobias Rudolphi
Head of Software Excellence & Partner, Zühlke
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