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The EU AI Act just hit a major deadline, and most of the coverage missed the part that actually matters for marketing teams: AI-generated content now has to be disclosed, and the fines for getting it wrong can outweigh even GDPR penalties.
In this episode of the Brand Intelligence Podcast, James Borg sits down with Alex Hubbard, VP of Product and AI at IntelligenceBank, to break down what’s actually changing in marketing compliance this quarter, and why it matters far beyond Europe.
They discuss:
- What changed in EU AI regulation on August 2nd, and why it’s already law, not a future deadline
- Why brands outside Europe, including in the UK, Australia, and the US, are watching these changes just as closely
- The rise of “provenance” as the word Alex now hears in nearly every customer conversation
- Why knowing whether content came from a person, an approved AI tool, or an unapproved one has become a legal requirement, not a nice-to-have
- What IntelligenceBank’s product team is building in response, including facial recognition for talent rights, approval attestation, self-serve rule building, and multimodal video and audio risk review
- A simple test brand and marketing leaders can run right now to find their biggest compliance gaps before the quarter closes
This conversation offers a grounded look at where marketing compliance is heading, and what leaders need to do now to stay ahead of it.
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Episode Transcript
James Borg: Welcome to the Brand Intelligence Podcast, a show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands i’m James Borg, VP of Marketing for IntelligenceBank, and I’m joined here today by Alex Hubbard, our VP of Product and AI. Welcome, Alex, and thanks for joining me.
Alex Hubbard: Thanks for having me, James. It’s really good to be here!
James Borg: Let’s start wide for this particular series. So, what’s changed in marketing compliance this quarter?
Alex Hubbard: Well, I would start with Europe, because there’s actually quite a bit happening in AI governance right now, and I believe most of the coverage has missed what’s actually going on for a lot of our marketing and compliance folks.
So about three weeks ago, on the 2nd of August, the EU AI Act hit a major deadline. Now, the rules around how AI makes decisions about people, hiring, credit, that sort of thing, those have been pushed back by more than a year. But what hasn’t gotten delayed is the part that actually matters for us in marketing and marketing compliance.
So you now have to disclose when content is AI-generated, and you have to mark it in a machine-readable way, and this applies to deepfakes as well. So that’s law now. That’s not in 2027. And the fines for not adhering to the EU AI Act are not small. They’re around 70% of global turnover, and that’s actually higher than GDPR, which I believe sits around 4%.
Now, speaking of GDPR, there is a reform on the table as well that would loosen some of the rules around cookies and personal data. It’s still just a proposal. Nothing’s been passed yet. But what I believe marketing leaders should take from it, in conjunction with the EU AI Act, is that regulators are not waiting around for reform.
Listen to the full episode to hear more…
