Accelerating open-source AI innovation while staying sovereign

About REICHLUNDPARTNER

Founded in 1988, REICHLUNDPARTNER is Austria's leading digital marketing and advertising agency. In-house teams cover strategy, creative, digital marketing, media, technology, content, social media, and performance marketing. The agency serves top Austrian brands and global companies.

Around 2018, the agency created a dedicated AI task force, well before the current wave of AI adoption. Their guiding principle from the start: avoid vendor lock-in, which led them to open-source AI.

The challenge

Scaling open-source AI adoption while keeping digital sovereignty. Deployments via internal ticketing became a bottleneck. European clients demand data privacy, security, and compliance, and many AI services required sending data to third parties.

The team needed any business unit to experiment independently with new AI tools, without a lengthy internal process, and without compromising European data standards.

How Elestio fits

REICHLUNDPARTNER uses Elestio as their go-to platform to launch production-ready open-source software in minutes via a simple interface, removing deployment complexity entirely. Any team can now deploy a new AI tool, evaluate it against a use case, and decide on adoption without infrastructure expertise.

“Our goal has always been to stay flexible and avoid vendor lock-in. For us, open-source is not only about freedom of choice, it is also about maintaining control over our technology stack and operating AI solutions in a way that aligns with the expectations of our European clients. Elestio allows us to deploy open-source software quickly and securely without needing deep expertise in deployment and maintenance. The ability to spin up new AI tools within minutes has transformed how we experiment with emerging technologies and evaluate new use cases across the business.”