At first glance, the new obligations introduced by the EU AI Act may appear to pose a challenge primarily for the creative and marketing industries, particularly for content creators, video producers, graphic designers and social media specialists. In practice, however, from 2 August 2026 the regulation may also have a significant impact on the way modern business software is designed.
One particularly important aspect is that the greatest regulatory burden will not fall on development teams using artificial intelligence to support the coding process, but rather on providers of applications that offer AI-powered functions to their users.
In software development itself, the use of tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and ChatGPT will remain largely unchanged. Organisational issues, however, will become considerably more important. These include improving employees’ AI skills, known as AI literacy, documenting the use of artificial intelligence, introducing internal policies and ensuring proper oversight of the software development process.
For technology companies, the safe, responsible and informed use of AI is becoming a new mandatory element of compliance standards.
The most significant consequences of the regulation, however, will affect software products themselves. Enterprise resource planning, human resources and customer relationship management systems, as well as e-commerce platforms, are increasingly using AI to generate product descriptions, summarise documents, prepare business recommendations and create visual content.
A broad interpretation of the term “deepfake” may mean that companies will be required to label realistic AI-generated visualisations of products and properties, as well as synthetic audio materials.
New Obligations for Chatbots and AI Assistants
The new legal requirements will also apply to chatbots and AI assistants. From 2 August 2026, users should be informed when they are interacting with an algorithm rather than a human being.
This means that regulatory requirements will begin to influence the user experience directly, affecting application interfaces and the way interactions between users and systems are designed.
From the perspective of software producers, it is particularly important to distinguish between the provider of an AI system and the business entity that deploys it.
In many cases, transparency obligations will apply to the end customer using the system. However, the software provider will still need to ensure that the application includes appropriate mechanisms for labelling, logging, tracing the origin of content and reporting regulatory compliance.
AI Transparency by Design
New requirements will also emerge in relation to content provenance, AI metadata management and oversight of decisions made by models.
Alongside security, performance and personal data protection, companies will need to address a new category of requirements known as AI Transparency by Design.
This approach involves designing artificial intelligence systems with full consideration of the operating context, technical and informational aspects, and the needs of all stakeholders.
The aim is to ensure that transparency—including a clear and understandable explanation of how a system makes automated decisions—is embedded from the outset as a fundamental design principle.
The AI Act Could Have an Impact Similar to GDPR
In practice, the AI Act may prove to be for the software market what the General Data Protection Regulation was for personal data protection.
Just as the introduction of new privacy rules triggered the rapid development of tools for managing consent and data retention, the EU’s AI regulation is likely to create an entirely new category of software solutions.
These may include systems for labelling synthetic content, verifying its origin, auditing models, monitoring algorithms and automatically reporting whether an AI system complies with regulatory requirements.
Transparency in the use of artificial intelligence will become an integral part of the architecture of modern business systems.
Author: Piotr Karpiński, Software Development Director at Symfonia
Source: Managerplus.pl
