Definition
EU AI Act
The EU AI Act is the European Union's risk-tiered regulation of artificial intelligence. It classifies AI systems by risk and attaches obligations — transparency, human oversight, and traceability — proportional to that risk. For work platforms deploying agents, it pushes toward designs where consequential automated actions are reviewable and attributable by default.
Key takeaways
- The EU AI Act regulates AI by risk tier, scaling transparency, oversight, and traceability to the stakes.
- It pulls vendors toward auditable, human-in-the-loop designs even below the high-risk threshold.
- For work platforms it means: human approval on consequential actions, attribution, and immutable records.
- Planoda's propose/approve broker, shared audit trail, and cost ledger are built for this direction of travel.
Rather than regulating the technology in the abstract, the Act regulates uses by risk tier, escalating the requirements for transparency, human oversight, record-keeping, and accountability as the stakes rise. The practical effect for software vendors is a strong pull toward auditability and human-in-the-loop controls, even for systems that aren't formally high-risk — because the whole regulatory direction rewards traceable, overseeable automation and penalizes opaque action.
For a work platform, the relevant translation is concrete: a human can sit in the loop on actions that matter, every automated action is attributed to a principal, and the record is immutable. These are easier to design in from the first table than to bolt onto an agent layer after launch.
Planoda is built for this posture: propose-and-approve on consequential agent actions, an immutable audit trail shared with human actions, and transparent per-workspace AI cost control — so governed autonomy is the default, not an add-on.
Related terms
- Agent governanceAgent governance is the set of controls that make an AI agent's actions safe, attributable, and reviewable: human approval gates on consequential actions, an immutable audit trail of who approved what, role-based capability limits, and spend controls. It is the difference between an agent that suggests and one you can trust to act.
- Propose / Approve (AI Governance)Propose/approve is a governance pattern for autonomous software: instead of executing a consequential action directly, an AI agent emits it as a proposal that a human or policy must approve before it runs. It keeps fast, read-only work autonomous while gating destructive or irreversible operations — the practical way to give agents real power without surrendering control.
- AI AgentAn AI agent is a software system that uses a large language model to pursue a goal across multiple steps — reading context, choosing tools, and taking actions — rather than answering a single prompt. In a work platform, agents triage issues, draft updates, and execute multi-step tasks as autonomous teammates, bounded by the permissions and approvals their operators set.