If you use artificial intelligence in your business —or you're thinking about it— there's a date worth marking on the calendar: 2 August 2026. That's when most of the European Artificial Intelligence Regulation, known as the AI Act, becomes fully applicable. It's the world's first comprehensive law governing how AI is built and used, and although it sounds like something that only affects Big Tech, it also reaches the SMEs that embed AI in their products or processes.
The good news is that the law doesn't treat all AI the same. It's risk-based: the greater the impact a system can have on people's rights or safety, the more obligations it carries. Most everyday uses in a small business —an assistant that answers questions, a product recommender, a tool that sorts emails— fall into the low- or limited-risk categories, where what's mainly required is transparency: making it clear when someone is talking to an AI rather than a person, or when content has been generated artificially.
What if I'm a small company?
Here's more good news. The regulation provides for proportionate treatment of SMEs: simplified compliance frameworks, standardised documentation templates, access to regulatory testing environments (so-called sandboxes) and fines that take the size of the company into account. A small business isn't expected to build the same governance machinery as a multinational. But that doesn't mean you can ignore the law: penalties for prohibited practices can reach very high figures, and other breaches have consequences too.
What you can start doing now
There's no need to wait until the last day. The sensible thing is to start with a simple inventory: which AI systems you use, what for, and what data they handle. From there you can classify each one by its risk level and see which obligations apply —which in most cases boil down to informing the user properly and documenting what the system does. It's an exercise that, beyond preparing you for the law, usually leaves your use of AI tidier and easier to explain to clients.
At Luxion we help companies integrate AI in a way that's useful and also responsible. If you're not sure where the AI Act leaves you, we'll review it with you and tell you the concrete steps you'd need to take.