MICKAI
Sector · Sift the whole talent pool without the raw records ever leaving your building.

Executive Search and HR

Executive-search firms and corporate HR teams hold the most sensitive records an organisation produces: unredacted references, current and target salaries, board evaluations and performance files. They want to map, rank and shortlist candidates across that raw material at speed, but UK GDPR rules on special-category and automated processing mean those files cannot be handed to a cloud model for sifting. Mickai runs the entire talent-intelligence pipeline on hardware the firm owns, under keys it holds, so candidate mapping happens against the real records on-premise. The data never leaves the building, which removes the cross-border-transfer and third-party-processing exposure vector; the firm keeps its own obligations to candidates and clients.

The problem and our solution
The buyer

Executive-search firms and corporate HR functions that handle raw references, salaries and evaluations.

The problem

UK GDPR Articles 9 and 22 and the EU AI Act high-risk hiring regime mean unredacted candidate records cannot be processed by a cloud AI model.

Our sovereign solution

Mickai runs private talent sifting and candidate mapping over the raw executive records on hardware the firm owns, under its own keys.

The value

The firm gets full-strength candidate intelligence with no PII leaving the building and no third party ever seeing it.

The sovereign advantages

Five advantages hold across every sector, and they are architectural, not promotional. The third-party cloud-exposure vector is removed; your own physical, insider, and compliance controls remain yours.

Zero-trust data privacy

The data never leaves your hardware, so no third party and no cloud-provider employee ever sees it. What happens in the server room stays in the server room.

No vendor lock-in or outage exposure

You own the compute and the capability, so the system runs independent of the internet and of any cloud vendor's pricing, terms, or availability.

Data residency by default

The data never crosses a geographical or digital border because it never leaves the building, which removes the cross-border-transfer and third-party-processing friction of UK GDPR, Schrems II, and the sector rules. You keep your own obligations.

Proprietary advantage stays private

Fine-tune and run retrieval on your deepest archives to build a hyper-customised co-pilot, with no risk of your proprietary edge training a public model or leaking.

Predictable total cost of ownership

After the hardware and licence, queries cost essentially electricity. A capital asset you own and depreciate, instead of volatile per-token cloud bills.

The zero-espionage trust vault

There is no third-party cloud path, so no competitor and no vendor insider can scrape, intercept, or subpoena your prompts or your fine-tuned weights from the internet. The trust vault is closed by architecture.

Immunity to regulatory drift

You own the software snapshot on your own hardware, so a change to a cloud vendor's terms, a model deprecation, or an outage cannot reach you. The system stays predictable and auditable on-premise as the rules evolve.

The regulatory wedge

The specific rules that bar mainstream cloud AI from this sector's regulated data. Each one demands a named, auditable perimeter the operator controls, which a shared multi-tenant cloud cannot give.

UK GDPR Article 9, special-category personal data
UK GDPR Article 22, automated decision-making and profiling
EU AI Act, high-risk classification for AI used in recruitment and selection
Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the supervisory authority for UK data protection
Employment Rights Act and the Equality Act, fair and non-discriminatory hiring obligations
Organisations of this profile

The kind of organisation this serves, named illustratively from public information to characterise the market. These are target profiles, not customers: Mickai has no relationship, engagement, trial, or endorsement with any of them.

Korn FerryHeidrick & Struggles
The lead studios

The enterprise studios that lead in this sector, drawn from the eighteen that sit on the one sovereign substrate. Each runs on hardware the organisation owns, under one set of operator-held keys, writing to one Open Audit Record.

Ergon

HR

Runs the core HR and people-data workflows over raw employee and candidate records on-premise, so reference, salary and evaluation files are processed where they sit rather than shipped to a cloud vendor.

Xenia

CRM

Holds the candidate and client relationship graph and powers private talent mapping, so the firm can track introductions, pipelines and placements without exposing the network to a third party.

Nomos

Compliance and Regulator Mode

Keeps an auditable record of how candidate data is used and how shortlisting decisions are reached, supporting the firm's Article 22 and EU AI Act high-risk hiring obligations.

Pythia

Executive BI

Turns the on-premise talent pool into search-quality intelligence and shortlists for partners and hiring leaders, with the sensitive PII staying inside the server room.

Clio

Sovereign Meeting Note-Taker

Captures candidate and client interviews and committee discussions locally, so spoken assessments and references are transcribed and filed without a cloud transcription service ever hearing them.

See all eighteen on the sovereign services catalogue.

The opportunity

Executive search and corporate talent functions sit on a deep well of high-value, special-category data that current cloud AI offerings are effectively barred from touching, which has left the most lucrative part of the workflow, sifting raw candidate records at scale, largely manual. A sovereign system that can process those records in place opens this work to automation for the first time without forcing the firm to expand its regulatory and reputational exposure.

The outcome

Money won, money saved, risk removed, on hardware you own.

Search and HR teams can map and shortlist across the full body of raw candidate records on-premise instead of restricting AI to redacted scraps, recovering consultant and researcher hours that were lost to manual sifting. Because nothing is sent to a cloud model, the firm removes the third-party processing and cross-border-transfer exposure vector around its most sensitive data, retires per-seat and per-token cloud AI spend, and keeps an auditable trail for its Article 22 and EU AI Act high-risk hiring obligations; physical and insider controls remain its own responsibility.

Lawful B2B engagement

Map the sovereign stack to your executive search and hr estate.

Briefings are for organisations weighing a sovereign, on-premises deployment. Tell us about your estate and we will walk the pack, the regulatory crosswalk, and the deployment that fits your estate.

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