The vendor of the recruitment system sends an email: their AI module falls under the AI Act, and they will take care of the documentation and the CE marking. The same week, the works council asks what the organisation itself needs to do. HR looks to legal, legal looks to IT, and nobody is sure whether the answer is "nothing" or "a lot".
The answer lies somewhere in between, and it starts with your role. Under the AI Act almost every employer is a deployer: you use AI systems that someone else built. That role comes with its own list of obligations. Two obligations have applied to everyone since February 2025. A further set applies from December 2027 to anyone using AI in recruitment, evaluation or dismissal. Everyday use of ChatGPT or Copilot mostly falls outside that set, though not outside the GDPR.
Are you a provider or a deployer?
The AI Act assigns its obligations by role. The provider develops an AI system or places it on the market under its own name. The deployer uses such a system under its own authority, for its own work. Personal, non-professional use does not count.
The heavy obligations lie with the provider: risk management, technical documentation, conformity assessment. That is what the vendor in the opening scene means, and they are right. But it does not mean the employer is off the hook. The law gives the deployer a shorter list of its own.
One exception is worth knowing: you do become a provider if you market an existing system under your own name, modify it substantially or put it to a different purpose that makes it high-risk. An organisation that turns a general-purpose language model into a screening tool for applicants moves from one role to the other. If you use a tool as supplied, this does not arise.
What already applies to every employer?
Two parts of the law have applied since 2 February 2025, whatever AI you use.
Article 4, AI literacy. Organisations take measures that support the AI literacy of the people working with AI systems on their behalf. The Digital Omnibus turned this into a best-efforts obligation rather than a duty to achieve a result, but the duty remains. What you can show for it is set out in AI literacy in 2026. In essence: explain what AI can and cannot do, which data does not belong in a prompt and which tools the organisation has approved.
Article 5, the prohibited practices. Most of the prohibitions, such as social scoring by public authorities, do not affect an ordinary employer. One does: AI systems that infer the emotions of people in the workplace are prohibited, except for medical or safety reasons. That covers tools that score "enthusiasm" in a video interview, or software that reads an employee's mood from the tone of customer calls. If a package you use contains such a feature, switch it off; the safety exception is narrow and intended for situations such as fatigue detection for drivers.
Article 50 followed on 2 August 2026: anyone running a chatbot for customers or citizens must make clear that people are talking to AI.
When is an HR application high-risk?
Annex III of the AI Act lists the applications that count as high-risk. Point 4 covers employment, in two groups: AI for recruitment and selection (targeted job adverts, analysing and filtering applications, evaluating candidates), and AI for decisions within the employment relationship (promotion and termination, allocating tasks based on behaviour or personal traits, and monitoring and evaluating performance and behaviour).
What counts is the intended purpose of the system, not the technology behind it. A simple scoring model that ranks CVs is high-risk. A language model that drafts a job advert is not. What most organisations come across in practice:
| Application | What the AI Act says | What you need to do |
|---|---|---|
| Recruitment tool that filters or ranks applications | High-risk (Annex III, point 4) | Article 26, from 2 December 2027 |
| Appraisal or scheduling system that scores performance | High-risk (Annex III, point 4) | Article 26, from 2 December 2027 |
| Emotion recognition in interviews or in the workplace | Prohibited (Article 5), since 2 February 2025 | Switch it off |
| Copilot or ChatGPT for text, summaries, translations | Not high-risk | GDPR, Article 4, your own policy |
| Chatbot for customers or citizens | Transparency (Article 50), since 2 August 2026 | Make clear it is AI |
Most employers find themselves in the last two rows. What the GDPR asks of you there is covered in our article on the AI Act alongside the GDPR.
What do you have to do as a deployer?
For a high-risk system, the deployer's duties are set out in Article 26. In short:
- Use it as instructed. The provider supplies instructions for use, and you use the system as they describe. A tool built to shortlist candidates should not be used to reject them.
- Human oversight. You assign oversight to people who have the competence, the training and the authority to overrule an outcome. Someone who clicks "approve" with no way of deciding otherwise is not providing oversight.
- Monitor how it operates and keep the logs. You check whether the system does what it should, report anomalies to the provider and keep the logs the system generates, to the extent they are under your control.
- Inform workers and their representatives. Before putting the system into use, you tell the affected workers and the works council that they will be subject to it.
- Use the DPIA. The information from the provider feeds into the data protection impact assessment that the GDPR usually already requires in these situations.
Public bodies and a limited group of private organisations also need a fundamental rights impact assessment (FRIA, Article 27). What ordinary privacy rules ask of HR beyond this is covered in our article on working more safely with AI in HR.
Which dates apply after the Digital Omnibus?
The Digital Omnibus on AI has been in force since 27 July 2026 and changed the timeline on one point: the obligations for high-risk systems in Annex III apply from 2 December 2027 instead of 2 August 2026. For AI embedded as a safety component in regulated products, the date is 2 August 2028.
Nothing else moved. The prohibited practices and Article 4 have applied since 2 February 2025, and the transparency rules of Article 50 since 2 August 2026. The full timeline, including what did and did not shift, is in the AI Act timeline after the Digital Omnibus.
Three questions that get mixed up
The confusion in the opening scene almost always comes from treating three different questions as one.
What is the system? The classification depends on the intended purpose the provider has documented. You will find it in the vendor's documentation, and the vendor is responsible for it.
What do you do with it? The same product can be a writing aid in one organisation and a selection tool in another. A recruiter who asks a general-purpose chatbot to rank fifty CVs by suitability is not using a high-risk system within the meaning of the law, but is making a decision to which the GDPR and the organisation's own policy apply.
Who is responsible? For use inside the organisation, that is always you, whatever the vendor has put in place. The vendor's email answers the first question and says nothing about the other two.
What does this look like in an organisation?
A mid-sized healthcare organisation has approved Copilot and circulated a short AI policy. An inventory finds ChatGPT, Perplexity and a meeting transcription tool in use alongside it. And the recruitment system HR has used for three years turns out to have gained, in an update, a feature that automatically ranks incoming applications. It was switched on, nobody had recognised it as AI and it was not documented anywhere.
That is not an incident. It shows that "which AI do we use" is not a question you answer once, and that the high-risk application is not always the tool that was bought as AI. The organisation switches the ranking feature off until HR has decided what oversight looks like, adds the four other tools to the overview and records a decision for each one. Whether such an overview is legally required is covered in our article on whether an AI register is mandatory.
BeeSensible links a catalogue of AI tools to the use observed in the organisation. Every tool in the catalogue carries an EU AI Act classification and a risk score; the organisation sets the status itself, and every tool starts out as "No decision yet". What is observed is only the tool's domain, at most once a day per device, without a user ID.
