The free EU AI Act compliance checklist in 10 steps
You know by now that the EU AI Act exists. Where your organisation actually stands is a good deal harder to say. This checklist answers that question in ten steps, in plain language and without needing a lawyer to sit beside you. You work through it at your own pace and you come out knowing what has to happen first.
Free, as a PDF in your inbox, in English, Dutch or French.
Who this checklist is for
For organisations that mainly use AI systems built by somebody else. A local authority running a chatbot, a school using marking support, a healthcare provider with decision support, an SME that has rolled out Copilot. In many cases that makes you a deployer rather than a provider.
It does not follow automatically. Anyone who has a system built and puts it on the market under their own name or brand is a provider, even without writing a single line of code. So you judge that role system by system and not once for the whole organisation.
In practice this is the checklist for whoever has to carry the subject internally. The IT lead, the quality coordinator, the HR manager or the owner who picks it up alongside everything else. No legal background is needed to fill it in.
What the checklist covers
Step 0, four questions and about two minutes. First the question worth asking before the rest means anything: do your organisation and the AI use within it fall within the scope of the AI Act? If the answer is no, you are done in two minutes.
Then ten steps. The core of it:
- The decision tree: am I a deployer? You settle that role system by system. For one system you may be the deployer and for another the provider. It is also the point organisations get wrong most often.
- AI literacy, the fastest win. What Article 4 asks, who it applies to and how you show that you are doing something about it.
- A risk scan for your organisation. Which of your applications weigh more heavily than you think and which do not.
- Practical governance and shadow AI. How you arrange responsibilities and rules of use and what you do about the tools your people already use without anyone knowing.
- Practical record keeping. How you track internally which measures you have taken. The law prescribes no particular form for that.
Your role, the type of system and the way you use it together decide what is expected of you. The checklist separates what already applies from the high-risk rules that the Digital Omnibus has pushed back: 2 December 2027 for the systems in Annex III and 2 August 2028 for AI embedded in regulated products.
You finish with an outcome A, B or C and a score. They do not tell you that you are "compliant". No checklist can do that. They tell you what needs attention first.
What this checklist is not
Not legal advice. Not a certificate. And not a list of things we claim the law demands.
That last point is deliberate. Article 4 of the EU AI Act asks organisations to take measures that support the development of AI literacy. Since the Digital Omnibus, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, it says explicitly that you do not have to guarantee a specific level of knowledge per individual. More softly worded than the old text but not optional. There is no prescribed course length, no compulsory curriculum and no certificate required by law. What counts as appropriate depends among other things on the knowledge and experience of the people working with the AI, the context you use it in and the persons or groups you apply it to.
This checklist helps you make that judgement. It promises nothing beyond that.
Download the checklist
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What you can do next
The checklist shows you where you stand. These three take you further:
- Take the free AI Adoption Scan. Where the checklist is a guide for you, the scan measures what is actually happening across your organisation. Your people fill it in and you get the report.
- Look at the AI literacy training. Twenty to thirty minutes per module, by role and by sector, with an exam and a certificate listing the learning outcomes and the articles covered.
- Read what Article 4 asks in practice. The full explanation, updated after the Digital Omnibus.
The rules keep moving. We track that daily in the EU AI Act Monitor and this checklist moves with them.