AI literacy
Obligation of providers and deployers to take measures to support the development of AI literacy among their staff and other persons dealing with the operation and use of AI systems on their behalf.
It is one of the Regulation’s broadest horizontal obligations: it reaches any company using AI, whatever the risk of its tools, and it is a measures-based obligation, not one of result.
Which obligations it carries
A legal obligation of providers and deployers, applicable from 2 February 2025. It is a measures-based obligation: Article 4(1) itself, as amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, states that it “does not require providers or deployers to guarantee any specific level of AI literacy of any individual”. The measure required is modulated by six factors the article itself lists: four about the persons — their technical knowledge, experience, education and training — and two about the use: the context in which the systems are to be used and the persons or groups of persons on whom they are to be used.
What it is not
It is not a level, an accreditation or a qualification. There is no threshold to pass and no diploma to display: the wording expressly rules out any obligation to guarantee a specific level for any individual. Nor is it an obligation only of those who develop: it reaches the deployer equally, which is the role of almost any company that buys software with AI in it. And it does not depend on the risk category: it applies whether or not the tools are high-risk.
The nuance almost nobody captures
The personal scope is wider than almost every inventory records: it is not “your staff”, it is your staff “and other persons dealing with the operation and use of AI systems on their behalf”. Subcontracted staff, agencies and freelancers operating the tool on the company’s behalf are within scope. And there is institutional support that Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 added and almost nobody uses: Article 4(2) requires the Commission to publish practical examples of how to comply on the single information platform of Article 62(3), point (b), and Article 4(3) tasks the AI Board with recommendations on common objectives.