Since August 1, 2024, the European regulation on artificial intelligence (AI Act, EU Regulation 2024/1689) reshuffles the deck for all companies that use digital tools on a daily basis. This regulation changes the way we recruit, how we score a client, or how we generate marketing content. Understanding these new rules and cross-referencing them with market changes allows for better decision-making to remain competitive in 2024 and beyond.
AI Literacy: The Business Skill No One Had on the Agenda
Have you ever noticed that an AI tool suggests responses to an email or automatically sorts applications? Starting February 2, 2025, the AI Act imposes a specific obligation on organizations: to train their teams in understanding and properly using AI. The official term is “AI literacy.”
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In practical terms, this means that every employee who uses an AI system in their work must understand what the tool does, what data it uses, and what limitations it has. This is not an optional awareness module. It is a regulatory obligation that applies to both a small business using a chatbot and a large corporation deploying customer scoring.
To keep up with these regulatory changes and their consequences for business management, business news on Infos Décideur regularly documents the new constraints facing leaders.
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The stakes go beyond compliance. A team that understands how its AI tools work makes better decisions. It identifies biases in automated CV sorting, and it knows when an algorithmic suggestion should be ignored. AI literacy becomes a direct competitive advantage, not just a checkbox.
Mandatory Transparency on AI-Generated Content: Impact on Marketing
Starting August 2, 2026, any company that publishes content generated or modified by AI must clearly indicate this to the public. Text, image, audio, video: all formats are affected. Penalties for non-compliance can be severe.
For a marketing team, this change is concrete. A product visual edited by AI, a product sheet written by a language model, a promotional video with synthetic voice: each element must carry an explicit mention.
What This Changes for Content Strategies
Many companies have massively adopted generative AI to accelerate their content production. The transparency mandated by the AI Act forces a rethink of the mix between human-generated and automated content. A blog post entirely generated by AI, labeled as such, will not have the same impact on reader trust as content written by an identified expert.
The question is not whether to abandon AI. It is about choosing where it adds real value (data analysis, personalization, translation) and where the human factor remains the quality signal expected by the market.
Prohibited AI Practices: Concrete Pitfalls to Avoid Now
The AI Act classifies certain practices as “unacceptable risk.” They have been strictly prohibited since February 2025. Here are the cases that directly affect companies, even small ones:
- Manipulation by AI, meaning using a system designed to influence a person’s behavior in a way that they do not perceive, for example, a sales chatbot programmed to exploit the emotional state detected in a client.
- Exploitation of vulnerabilities in a specific group, such as targeting aggressive advertisements at individuals identified as financially vulnerable by a scoring algorithm.
- Social scoring in the Chinese style applied to businesses, meaning scoring an employee or client based on aggregated behaviors unrelated to the subject of evaluation.
These prohibitions do not only target tech giants. A small business using a CRM tool with automatic scoring must ensure that the criteria used do not fall into these categories.
Competitive Monitoring and Technologies: Adapting Decision-Making Tools
Beyond regulation, the ability to monitor one’s market determines competitiveness. The companies that thrive in 2024 are not those that adopt all new technologies. They are those that choose the right tools for their context.
Three Criteria to Evaluate an Innovation Before Adopting It
- Regulatory compliance: before deploying an AI tool, check if it falls into a “high-risk” category according to the AI Act, which imposes audits and specific technical documentation.
- The actual return on investment, measured in the field and not just based on the vendor’s promise. A tool that saves time but generates undetected errors costs more than it brings in.
- Team ownership: software that no one uses correctly improves nothing. Training (related to the literacy obligation) is not a bonus; it is a condition for profitability.
Monitoring is not limited to products and services. Keeping track of regulatory developments, new transparency obligations, and prohibited practices is an integral part of a sustainability-oriented business strategy.
Companies approaching 2024-2026 with an advantage are not the most technological. They are those that integrate innovation, team training, and regulatory compliance into a single strategy. The AI Act transforms AI governance into a competitiveness criterion, on par with product quality or cost control. Ignoring this framework amounts to taking a measurable financial and reputational risk.