The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act: An Analysis of Preliminary Perceptions and Responses of Irish SMEs

EU is preparing to introduce the AU AI Act, hopefully by end of 2023. This is causing a great amount of anxiety among a variety of industries. In this study, we look at the EU-AI Act and its impact on Irish small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to analyze what would be the perception of the act as well as the pain points of the SMEs in adapting to this act. We use qualitative methods and semi-structured interviews to identify themes and patters in our study. We find the general lack of trust in government’s support and heavy regulatory requirement from resource constrained SMEs are the primary factors that are causing concerns in this sector.