This article is part of a series on the operational impacts of the EU AI Act. The full series can be accessed here, with the other articles in the series listed below.

Launched in 2015, the EU's Digital Single Market Strategy aimed to foster the digital harmonization between the EU member states and contribute to economic growth, boosting jobs, competition, investment and innovation in the EU.

The EU AI Act characterizes a fundamental element of this strategy. By adopting the first general-purpose regulation of artificial intelligence in the world, Brussels sent a global message to all stakeholders, in the EU and abroad, that they need to pay attention to the AI discussion happening in Europe.

The AI Act achieves a delicate balancing act between the specifics, including generative AI, systemic models and computing power threshold, and its general risk-based approach. To do so, the act includes a tiered implementation over a three-year period and a flexible possibility to revise some of the more factual elements that would be prone to rapid obsolescence, such as updating the threshold of the floating point operations per second — a measurement of the performance of a computer for general-purpose AI models presumed to have high impact capabilities. At the same time, the plurality of stakeholders involved in the interpretation of the act and its interplay with other adopted, currently in discussion or yet-to-come regulations will require careful monitoring by the impacted players in the AI ecosystems.

This article provides insight into regulatory implementation and application alongside EU digital strategy in relation to the EU AI Act.

Top 10 operational impacts of the EU AI Act

The overview page for the series can be accessed here.

• Subject matter, definitions, key actors and scope
• Understanding and assessing risk
• Obligations on providers of high-risk AI systems
• Obligations on nonproviders of high-risk AI systems
• Obligations for general-purpose AI models
• Governance: EU and national stakeholders
• AI Assurance across the risk categories
• Post-market monitoring, information sharing and enforcement
• Regulatory implementation and application alongside EU digital strategy
• Leveraging GDPR compliance