The EU AI Act Wants You to Govern Your Data

The EU AI Act has been in force since August 2024, and it has something to say about your data.

For higher-risk AI systems, the Act expects the training data to be relevant, representative, and checked for errors. In plain English: you should know what your data is, where it came from, whether it suits the job, and whether anyone has looked at it lately.

That's data governance. Not as a garnish, but as part of compliance itself.

You don't need to be in Europe for this to matter. Frameworks travel. Customers ask about them. And the underlying habits — know your data, check your data, document your data — are just good practice everywhere.

Govern the data, and the compliance gets easier. Skip it, and everything downstream gets harder.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.