Private Document Assistant with Ollama

Self-hosted AI assistant for confidential document analysis without cloud exposure.

Overview

An OpenClaw Ollama setup gives you a private AI assistant that reads your documents without sending data to external services. Critical when working with confidential information like customer data, financial records, and internal strategy documents.

How It Works

1. Point OpenClaw at a folder of documents (contracts, reports, meeting notes)
2. Index them using local embedding model and Ollama for inference
3. Ask questions in natural language
4. Agent searches indexed documents and answers based only on your private data

Example Queries

• "What did we agree on regarding payment terms in the Acme contract?"
• "Summarize all Q4 financial reports"
• "Find mentions of 'liability' in our legal documents"

Technical Setup

• Run Ollama on your server
• Configure OpenClaw to use it as LLM backend
• Index documents with embeddings
• Connect vector database for semantic search

Benefits

• Runs entirely on your infrastructure
• No data leaves your VPS or local machine
• Complete data control
• Privacy without sacrificing AI capabilities

Trade-offs

More technical than cloud-based setups, but you maintain complete data sovereignty.

Source

Contabo Blog - OpenClaw Use Cases for Business in 2026