What is the EU AI Act?
Following its recent approval by the European Parliament, it’s only a matter of formalities until the EU’s new, comprehensive legal framework on artificial intelligence (“the EU AI Act" or “the act”) will see the light of day.
Its creation has been a long and winding road, where the involved stakeholders have tried to strike a balance between many important (and sometime contradictory) purposes, such as:
Fostering and safeguarding digital innovation in the EU
Providing companies with clear obligations when using or offering AI
Protecting the fundamental rights of EU citizens.
The act will put obligations on companies offering and using software using AI, and in particular those used for recruitment purposes. So let’s dig into what the act will bring - in general and for Teamtailor and our customers in particular!
What will the EU AI act mean for companies?
What obligations a company will have under the EU AI Act will depend on four main factors:
Does the technology used or offered by the company fall under the act’s definition of an ‘AI system’?
Does the AI system fall under a specific category of AI systems? For example, the act contains stricter obligations on general purpose AI, and on general purpose AI systems that can cause a systemic risk.
What role will the company have when using or offering the technology? The act contains an extensive catalogue of roles, such as provider, deployer, distributor and operator, with varying responsibilities. It will be important to define the role of every company in the “value chain” of creating, further developing and using an AI system.
What level of risk is related to the AI system? The act defines four levels of risks: unacceptable risk, high risk, limited risks and minimal risk.
A large part of the act’s provisions concern high risk AI systems, and in particular providers of high risk AI systems. Providers of high risk AI systems will, for example, be obliged to establish risk and quality management systems, perform conformity assessments prior to placing the AI system on the market, perform post-market surveillance and register the AI system in an EU database.
What will the EU AI Act mean for Teamtailor?
Already today, all Teamtailor customers who choose to activate them can use AI-based features in the Teamtailor service, such as Co-pilot, a set of features that help you in your daily recruiting tasks.
Since we are continuously developing the Teamtailor service, it’s possible that even more AI-based features will be available in Teamtailor when the rules of the EU AI Act become applicable.
For this reason, we have already started our analysis of the different requirements of the act, based on the four factors mentioned above.
We are paying particular attention to the circumstances under which an AI system is considered high risk, since the main rule under the act is that any AI system used for recruitment purposes is to be considered a high risk AI system.
However, there are exemptions to this rule, for example when the AI system is intended to perform a narrow procedural task, or when it’s intended to improve the result of a previously completed human activity. Because of this, one of our most important tasks will be to assess whether the AI systems in our service offering will be considered high risk or not, and to document our analysis.
The outcome of this analysis will be one of the main factors in determining exactly how to prepare for the act.
As a Teamtailor customer, you can rest assured that we will be working hard to create any assessments, documentation, information, certifications, registrations or similar that we need to under the act.
What will the EU AI Act mean for Teamtailor’s customers?
If you choose to use an AI-based Teamtailor feature, it’s likely that you, too, will have obligations under the EU AI Act. For example, you may be expected to provide particular information to your candidates about how you use the AI features.
We will be able to provide you with more details on what obligations will likely fall on you, respectively on Teamtailor, once the final text of the act has been published and guidelines have been made available by the regulators, such as the EU Commission.
And, of course, you can rely on us to share the information and documentation you will need from us, by the time the relevant rules come into force.
DISCLAIMER: This text is not legal advice, but created for informative purposes only. We always recommend that you make your own assessments and decisions. This text has been created based on the most recent, non-official version of the draft EU AI Act. Certain concepts, definitions etc. may change with the publication of the official text.