EU AI Act
Article 4: what AI literacy actually requires of you.
From August 2026, every company that uses AI has to make sure the people working with it have sufficient AI literacy. Not your vendor's people. Yours. Here is what that means in practice.
What Article 4 says
The EU AI Act places a direct obligation on both providers and deployers of AI systems. A deployer is any company using an AI system in its own operations, which covers almost every business using tools like Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude at work.
The obligation: take measures to ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy among your staff and anyone else operating AI systems on your behalf. Literacy has to account for their technical knowledge, their experience, their education and training, and the context the system is used in.
Who is exposed
If your people use AI in their daily work, you are a deployer, and Article 4 applies. Company size does not exempt you. There is no small-business carve-out.
The exposure is broadest where AI use has grown informally: teams that adopted tools themselves, without a training programme, a policy, or any record of who was taught what.
- You use AI tools in day-to-day operations
- Your people adopted tools without formal training
- You cannot currently show who has been trained, on what, and when
- AI touches decisions about people, customers or money
What counts as sufficient
The Act does not prescribe a curriculum, which is exactly what makes it uncomfortable. What it asks for is proportionate, role-appropriate literacy, kept current.
A one-off webinar for the whole company does not meet that standard. Someone drafting client-facing text with AI needs different literacy than someone approving an automated decision. And because the tools change constantly, literacy is not a certificate you file once.
- Matched to the role, not one course for everyone
- Kept up to date as tools and risks change
- Covers risks, limits and responsible use, not just prompting
- Evidenced: you can show what was delivered, to whom, and when
How Maistry solves it
Scan establishes where every employee actually stands, per role. That baseline is what makes the rest proportionate rather than generic.
Coach delivers the training as a path per person, built from that baseline and refreshed as tools change. Completion produces a certificate per employee, and a score you can report at company and department level.
The result is the thing Article 4 asks for and most companies cannot produce: evidence, current, and specific to the role.
This page is general information about the EU AI Act, not legal advice. For your specific obligations, consult qualified counsel.