CTI Digital has opened public access to Croft, its sovereign AI platform built on UK-controlled infrastructure operated by Nublue, part of the CTI Group, targeting private companies and charities seeking to deploy AI while retaining control over data, documents, prompts and outputs; this is a product launch, not a transaction, and no deal consideration arises.

CTI Digital is a Manchester-headquartered full-service digital transformation agency, part of the Definition Group, which was acquired by BGF in February 2024. CTI Group also includes Nublue, a Lancashire-based hosting and eCommerce infrastructure provider that serves as the underlying infrastructure operator for Croft. 

CTI Digital employs more than 150 specialists with estimated annual revenue of approximately $27.4 million (€25 million). Croft supports private hosted environments, hybrid deployments and dedicated GPU infrastructure, connecting to existing business systems including CRM, content management, customer service software and eCommerce platforms.

The structural driver is the convergence of three enterprise concerns: data sovereignty, AI governance and subscription cost proliferation. UK organisations deploying commercially available AI tools face simultaneous questions about where data is stored, who processes it, and how to maintain audit trails for compliance with UK GDPR, NIS2 and, for financial services clients, DORA. 

The sovereign AI market has emerged as the structural response, AI infrastructure that keeps workloads within a defined jurisdiction and under direct organisational control, without reliance on hyperscaler model APIs routing data through non-UK infrastructure. CTI Digital's positioning of Croft as an alternative to "overseas technology platforms" directly addresses public sector and regulated industry procurement requirements where data residency is a contractual obligation.

The retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture underpinning Croft's internal knowledge search capability is the technically significant element. RAG allows organisations to connect their own document repositories and data systems to a private language model without that data leaving the controlled environment, the specific requirement that disqualifies most commercially hosted AI tools from use with sensitive or regulated information.

For the sector, CTI Digital's Croft launch demonstrates that UK digital agencies with managed hosting capability are now building sovereign AI products as a natural extension of their infrastructure services, creating a new competitive layer in the UK enterprise AI market.

Source: itbrief.co.uk / ctidigital.com / manchesterdigital.com / growjo.com