The AI Act gives smaller businesses some relief: simplified technical documentation templates and lighter expectations on quality management, which the Digital Omnibus confirmed and extended.
It's worth knowing about. It's also easy to misread.
What the template doesn't do
A template tells you what to fill in. It doesn't tell you what applies to you. Working out whether your chatbot, screening tool or scoring system counts as high-risk, transparency-only or minimal risk is still the real work. So is working out whether you're the provider or the deployer of each one.
Getting that wrong on an official form is still getting it wrong, and the classification is what a regulator would ask you to justify.
What to do
Before you reach for any template, answer one question for each AI tool you use: what decision or interaction is it part of, and who does it affect? That answer decides which rules apply. The template comes after.
Want to know where your business stands? Take the two-minute check.
Sources: Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act)