How can associations retain their member value in the age of AI? Consider Self-Hosted RAG with Open LLMs

Sounds too technical? Those are the terms association executives need to get intimately familiar with if they want to stay relevant in the age of AI. Threat to your associations' relevancy is real. In our previous blog post Is AI a threat to Trade and Professional associations value proposition? we discussed in general terms what may happen to associations which do not become itimately familiar with AI in the nearest future.

Now it is time for a more technical dive. If this feels a bit overwhelming - we are always here to help.

Use Case Scenario:

• We want only authenticated current members to have access to our valuable industry data and information.

• All of our data should stay protected and not leak outside of our secure storage.

• All our data lives in SharePoint or similar + web sites.

• We want an LLM that only answers based on our private data, not general AI knowledge.

Best Solution: Self-Hosted RAG with Open LLMs

Recommended Architecture:

• Local/Open-source LLM (e.g. LLaMA 2, Mixtral, or Mistral-7B)

• RAG pipeline (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

• Index of corporate data (vector DB like FAISS or Weaviate)

• Document ingestion from SharePoint + web (custom or prebuilt connectors)

• Hosted on your servers or private cloud (Azure, AWS, on-prem)

Stack Example (Secure and Private):

Layer	Tool / Tech
LLM	LLaMA 2, Mixtral, Mistral (run locally via vLLM, Ollama, or LM Studio)
Vector DB	FAISS (local, lightweight), Weaviate, or Qdrant
Embedding Model	sentence-transformers or OpenEmbed/MiniLM
Data Source Integration	Use Microsoft Graph API for SharePoint, web crawlers for intranet
RAG Pipeline	LangChain or LlamaIndex
Frontend	Streamlit, React app, or chatbot interface

Why This Works for You

• No outside API calls – everything runs on your infrastructure.

• Grounded answers – model retrieves relevant content from your SharePoint/Data Cloud/web server index.

• Custom permissions – you control access and audit logs.

• Extendable – can be enhanced with metadata filtering, user auth, etc.

Alternative: Bedrock + Claude with VPC (less control, still private)

If you must use a commercial LLM like Claude but want tight data controls:

• Use Claude on Amazon Bedrock.

• Set up a private VPC with no internet egress.

• Use Kendra to index SharePoint data + plug into Claude.

• Still not “self-hosted,” but data doesn’t leave your environment.

TL;DR Recommendation:

Deploy LLaMA 2 or Mixtral locally with a RAG pipeline using LlamaIndex or LangChain. Store corporate embeddings in FAISS or Qdrant. Extract data from SharePoint via Microsoft Graph API.

Have further questions or ready to discuss implementation: we are always happy to help brainstorm or help your organization navigate ever-changing Information Technology landscape.