Navigating the EU AI Act in Global Market Research

Understanding the Risk Tiers

The EU AI Act categorizes AI systems by risk. While most market research AI (like survey routing or basic sentiment analysis) falls into the 'limited risk' tier requiring transparency, biometric categorization or emotion recognition algorithms face severe restrictions.

Transparency Obligations

If you use AI to interact with respondents (e.g., an AI moderator in a chat-based qualitative study), you must explicitly disclose that the respondent is interacting with a machine. Failing to do so carries massive financial penalties.

Data Governance Imperatives

Researchers must ensure that the datasets used to train their proprietary AI models are free from copyright infringement and represent diverse populations to prevent discriminatory outcomes in the final research insights.