SME and the European AI Act

The European AI Act, a proposed European law on artificial intelligence is the first law on AI by a major regulator. It lays down harmonised rules for the EU. The European Commission unveiled this new proposal for an EU regulatory framework in April 2021. "As expected, the debate around this legislation has already started. On the positive side, this regulation may become the global standard, in the same way GDPR has become. It may also make AI systems more trustworthy and offer extra protections to the public. On the other side, it may stifle innovation, add more costs and red tape, which may hinder start-ups from entering the market. We will hear more on this around the world before it becomes law, currently expected in 2023. With the rise of Industry 4.0 the approach to producing goods and services has triggered a trend in the current manufacturing industry that focuses on automation of processes and data exchange. The approach integrates the Internet of Things (IoT), cyber-enhanced systems and cloud computing and relies heavily on the timely availability of data about every aspect and stage of the production/creation process. The IoT is not something you will experience as such itself. What you will see is that more and more objects become connected. If you are manufacturing products, you will be negotiating with providers of connectivity and in the very near future with any tiny part of the artefact that you are intending to build. It becomes very important to know the origin of these artefacts. We are in the middle of a manufacturing revolution, a five-year cycle as we can see from what happened to the products itself in the supply chain. In the 2013 Introduction to the Springer book Enabling Things to Talk Prof. Dr. Michael ten Hompel, Managing Director at Fraunhofer-Institut for "Materialfluss und Logistik", describes the consequences for something as "solid" as logistics: "The logical consequence of the Internet of Things is not just a new philosophy of how we can control our production and logistics.