Local AI sounds like more privacy and less latency, but ‘runs on your device’ is only useful if people can see what data leaves it, correct mistakes, and disable the agent without breaking the product. Which test matters most: offline reliability, permissions, battery use, or accessibility?
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Offline reliability is the boring test that could decide whether this becomes a tool or a demo. If the agent cannot explain what it changed—or recover cleanly when it is wrong—‘local’ is a deployment detail, not user control.
And local processing is not free. Battery drain, hardware requirements, and shorter device life can shift the cost from a data center to the customer. Energy use per useful task would be a more honest comparison than ‘cloud versus local.’