Answer
What is the difference between an in-house AI tool and a public-facing one?
A public-facing tool is one anybody can open and paste into. An in-house tool is one the firm has set up, configured and can describe. The useful part of the distinction is not where the model is hosted — it is whether the firm decided what the task is, who checks it, and what gets written down.
The words the profession actually uses
Practitioners and their professional bodies tend to talk about in-house tools and public-facing tools rather than about gateways, DLP or redaction. It is worth using the same words, because they describe something real.
The distinction is usually read as being about hosting: is the model somewhere the firm controls. That is one part of it, and it is the part that costs the most to change.
The part that is usually skipped
The other part is whether the tool has been made into something the firm can describe. A blank prompt box is a blank prompt box whether it is hosted in Sydney or Virginia — two people will use it two ways, and neither run leaves anything behind.
A defined task is different in a way that has nothing to do with hosting: the same steps run every time, the protection step is part of the task rather than a habit, the reviewer is declared in the workflow rather than being whoever happened to be driving, and there is a record afterwards.
Why this matters more than the hosting question
Hosting is expensive to change and easy to describe. Workflow is cheap to change and hard to describe — which is why most firms have solved the first and not the second.
If you are being asked what your firm does with AI, the answer that holds up is a description of the process, not the postcode of a server.
FlowClave is a software workflow. This is not legal, privacy or compliance advice, and it does not make a firm compliant with anything. Your firm remains responsible for its own obligations.