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Choosing a Provider

Six providers are supported, and they are not interchangeable. They differ in where your requests are processed, in what they keep, and in what the platform can do with them: some take documents as PDFs and return citations, others receive everything as one block of text and report no costs. Weigh those before model quality, which is the easiest thing to change later.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Configuration:

  • AI Settings — one section per provider, and the roles table that decides who uses which

Architect Panel → Activity:

  • AI Usage — cost by model and service once the choice is live

Ask the questions that are hard to reverse

  1. Where are requests processed? On Amazon Bedrock you choose the AWS Region, and the model id's prefix decides whether AWS may serve it from elsewhere in that geography or, for a global. id, from any commercial Region. For the providers' own APIs, take the answer from the provider's terms.
  2. What does the provider keep? Retention and training use differ by provider and by contract. On Bedrock, GPT-6 requests are sent with storage switched off unless you change Let Bedrock store OpenAI requests.
  3. Under what agreement? A business agreement and a personal plan differ enormously. Use an organisational account in every case.

Whoever signs off your data protection position needs those answers, not benchmark scores.

What each choice means on the platform

  • Claude, through Anthropic or through Bedrock: documents can go as PDFs, answers can cite the page they came from, token counts and costs are reported, and long answers stream.
  • GPT-6 through Bedrock: documents go as their extracted text, without citations. Costs are reported. From UK and EU Regions these models are offered only through their global profile.
  • OpenAI, Gemini, GitHub Models and Grok through their own APIs, and other Bedrock models such as Nova: reached in prompt mode. Documents go as text, there are no citations, and no token counts come back, so AI Usage shows these calls as not priced and AI billing charges them on an estimate from characters.
  • Gemini is also the only provider for image and video generation, whichever provider your text features use.

A stored PDF goes to a text-only route as its extracted text, which exists only once the document has been through the Document Text Extraction task. A document-heavy feature therefore works best on Claude.

Configure the default first

Every role without a provider of its own inherits builder, so the builder provider carries most of your AI traffic. Settle that choice first; pointing individual roles elsewhere then becomes tuning rather than a separate approval each time.

Choosing and switching

  1. Write down the answers to the three questions for each provider you are considering.
  2. Enter the chosen provider's key and default model on AI Settings, and set it as the builder provider.
  3. Test builder on AI Usage, then use the features for a fortnight.
  4. Group AI Usage by feature and by model to see where cost and failures sit, and point only those roles elsewhere.

Keys are credentials with a bill attached

A leaked key is somebody else's usage charged to you. Enter keys only on AI Settings, where they are never displayed again; never paste them into a ticket or an e-mail; and rotate them on a schedule. On Bedrock, give AI its own least-privilege AWS user and stop it using the platform's own AWS keys.

What goes wrong, and how to tell

  • A feature's answers are worse after a switch: compare Not usable for that feature on AI Usage before and after; a prompt-mode provider may fail structured answers more often.
  • Costs disappear from AI Usage after a switch: the new provider reports no token counts. Read its own billing instead.
  • Citations stop appearing in a custom feature: the role moved off Claude.

Worked example

An organisation with public-sector clients chooses Claude on Amazon Bedrock in its own AWS account in London, because the Region and the agreement can be named in a security questionnaire. It records the decision, gives AI a dedicated AWS user, and later switches on image generation, which runs on Gemini, for its marketing team only, noting in the same record that those requests go to Google.

Recommendations

  • Choose on processing location and terms before capability.
  • Get the builder provider right; it carries most of the traffic.
  • Prefer Claude for work over documents, where PDFs and citations matter.
  • Write down which providers you use and what each receives, before somebody asks.
  • Review the choice yearly: models are retired, and shutdown warnings appear on AI Usage first.