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EU AI Act, what hits me as an SMB?

The Act phases in. Banned practices: February 2025. General-AI rules: August 2025. High-risk systems: mostly 2026 and 2027. Read per phase.

Try this first

  1. 1Define your role: provider (you build or sell), deployer (you use), importer, or distributor. Duties differ.
  2. 2Assess the risk class: banned, high-risk, limited, minimal. Annex III of the Act lists them.
  3. 3For minimal-risk tools (chatbots, mail assistants, summarisers), transparency usually suffices. Disclose AI-generated output.
  4. 4For high-risk (HR, credit scoring, critical infrastructure, biometrics) you face risk management, data quality, technical documentation, logging, human oversight, robustness. Not DIY; ask the vendor for their conformity declaration.
  5. 5Maintain an internal register of AI tools in use. It will be as routine as the GDPR processing register.

When to bring us in

Building a high-risk system yourself or training a foundation model above 10^25 FLOPs? Different regime. Get specialist counsel.

See also

None of the above fits?

Describe your situation below. We pass your input plus the steps you already saw to our AI and return tailored next-step advice. If it's too risky to DIY, we'll say so.

Who are you?

For the AI question we need your email and company, so we can follow up if the AI gets stuck, and to prevent abuse.

Limited to 2 questions per hour and 5 per day, kept lean so the AI stays useful. For more, contacting us directly works better for you and us.

Or skip the DIY entirely

Our Managed IT clients do not look these things up. One point of contact, a fixed monthly price, resolved within working hours.