Finally, a Swiss AI that actually does the work!

I've been waiting for this for a long time, and many of you have asked me the same question:

is there an AI where your information doesn't go to the United States, doesn't pass through third parties, where your files are hosted in Switzerland, where the AI runs on local servers, and where nothing is ever trained on your data?

The answer is finally yes!

Meet Lancya. And best of all, it's one that actually does good work.

You can start using it for free right now at www.lancya.ch. But first, let me show you a few things I really liked.

Honestly, I was expecting something a notch below, nice for the local angle but limited.

Surprise: it's smooth, it's fast, it's genuinely useful.

I find myself doing just as much with it as I do with Claude.

For 99% of you, it'll be more than enough. Your files stay in Switzerland (with Infomaniak, the Swiss cloud provider), the AI runs in Switzerland (on Infomaniak's servers and GPUs), and nothing is ever used to train a model.

What's inside, in short:

• It creates real Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents, ready to download.

• It runs web searches when it helps.

• It reads and analyzes your files (PDFs, Excel, images...).

• It runs code to calculate, analyze and produce charts.

• Agents and a library of skills designed specifically for Switzerland (employment law, taxes, HR, accounting...), with new Swiss skills and agents added all the time.

• In short, pretty much everything you do with Claude.

The best way is to try it yourself. Say you want a polished presentation on a topic that matters to you: your market, a trend in your industry, a project to pitch. Copy this prompt, JUST REPLACE THE TOPIC WITH YOURS, and see what it produces:

Create an HTML presentation on [YOUR TOPIC, for example: the Swiss wine
market, AI in my industry, my startup project].

Start with a web search for recent figures and reliable sources,
then cite your sources on the last slide.

Format and navigation (important):
- A single, fully self-contained HTML file, with NO external libraries or
  fonts to download: everything must work offline. Do NOT use reveal.js or
  a CDN; code the navigation yourself in plain JavaScript.
- Only one slide visible at a time, full screen, 16:9 format.
- Obvious navigation: clearly visible, clickable previous and next buttons
  at the bottom, plus a slide counter (for example 03 / 09). You can also
  move forward with the keyboard arrows. Each slide appears all at once,
  no effect where you have to click several times to reveal the text.

Content: a cover slide with a strong title, a context slide,
3 or 4 key ideas each backed by a figure, a concrete example,
a slide with a clean chart, and a conclusion with recommendations.

Design: premium, understated and very modern, design-studio style. Off-white
background, a single elegant and subtle accent color, very readable dark text,
lots of white space, generous margins. Strong typographic hierarchy
(bold large titles, light subtitles, airy body text). One idea per slide,
no clutter, no garish gradients, no emojis. Soft transitions.
The chart must be minimalist and readable.

Two notes:

• I ask for HTML slides because Lancya displays them as an interactive artifact right in the conversation: you can click through the slides directly and take a screenshot of each one.

• You can swap in any topic you like.

On pricing: there's a free plan, so you can use it without paying a cent. The paid plans are, in my view, very generous for what you get. I'm on the most complete one, but pick whatever fits how much you use it.

Now, let's be honest, because that's how I like to talk to you. Lancya isn't for everyone:

• If you push AI to the extreme (deep coding, very advanced reasoning), Claude is still ahead. It's a company valued at over a trillion dollars. And they recently cut off access to their best models for non-Americans. Choosing Lancya is also a way to support Switzerland and push Europe to build its own models and its own tools.

• If you use it very heavily, Claude will stay cheaper at volume: they have almost unlimited resources and are burning cash to grab market share. Lancya runs on local infrastructure, so at very high volumes, the math is different.

• Let's be precise about hosting: your files are in Switzerland and the AI runs in Switzerland, but the software side (the application itself) is still in Europe. The full migration to Infomaniak is underway and coming very soon.

So there you have it. If you care about keeping your data close to home without giving up a tool that does the job, start using Lancya for free: www.lancya.ch.

P.S.: from now on, whenever I share prompts and skills in this newsletter, I'll demo them on Lancya. It's my way of helping you get the hang of it week after week. And don't worry: since prompts and skills work the same way across these tools, what I show you also works very well on Claude or ChatGPT, so you're never stuck.

It's just that, for anything that works on all three, I'll tend to feature Lancya. And when Claude or ChatGPT (or another one) does something the others can't, or does it better, I'll tell you about it too, of course. The idea is to give you the best, without dogma.