Do you need an AI compliance platform, or just the obligations?
A neutral read from a publisher that sells no platform. About 5 minutes.
We do not sell a compliance platform, so we have nothing to push here. For most mid-market teams facing AI in hiring, the honest answer is that you need the obligations handled first, and software second, if at all. A platform can help once you know what you are managing. It is a poor substitute for knowing.
What the two paths actually are
When the EU AI Act, or a US rule like New York's Local Law 144, lands on a team's desk, two routes get pitched. The first is to buy an AI governance platform: a dashboard that inventories your AI systems, tracks risk classifications, stores documentation, and produces audit-style reports. The second is quieter: work out which obligations apply to you, write down how you meet them, and keep that record current. One is a product. The other is a practice. They are often sold as if they were the same purchase. They are not.
What the law requires, and what it does not
This matters because the EU AI Act sets out duties, not tools. For a high-risk hiring system, a deployer's obligations under Article 26 are things like real human oversight, keeping the logs the system generates, monitoring the tool in use, and telling candidates where required (AI Act, Article 26). Where a fundamental-rights impact assessment is required, Article 27 describes what it must cover (AI Act, Article 27). Nowhere does the Act say you must buy software to do any of this, and US rules work the same way: New York City's Local Law 144 requires a bias audit, a public summary, and candidate notice, not a particular product. The duties can be met with a documented process, a named owner, and an evidence trail. Software can hold that trail; it cannot create the underlying compliance.
An honest comparison
| A governance platform | Knowing and documenting the obligations | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | Recurring licence, often four or five figures a year, plus setup and admin time. | Mostly people's time, plus low-cost templates. No recurring licence required. |
| What it gives you | A central place to log AI systems, track status, and generate reports. | A clear map of which duties apply, who owns each, and the evidence behind them. |
| What it does not give you | The underlying judgement: classifying a tool, assigning real oversight, deciding what is in scope. The platform records those; people still make them. | Automation and a dashboard. At small scale you may not need one; past a few dozen systems it gets harder to track by hand. |
| Best fit | Larger organisations with many AI systems across teams, where manual tracking breaks down. | Mid-market teams with a handful of AI tools, where the gap is clarity, not capacity. |
| The risk | Buying the dashboard and mistaking it for compliance, with empty fields and no real oversight behind the green ticks. | Letting the documentation go stale, or never starting because no single tool forces the habit. |
How to decide
Strip it back to two questions. How many distinct AI systems are you actually responsible for, and is your real gap clarity or capacity? If you run three or four hiring-adjacent tools and the problem is that nobody knows what the rules require, a platform solves the wrong problem; you need to understand and document the obligations. If you run dozens of AI systems across many teams and manual tracking is already failing, a platform can be worth it, but only on top of the obligations work, never instead of it. Either way, the documented obligations come first. The software, if you buy it, is where you store them.
What to do with this
Start by sizing the problem honestly for your own hiring stack: which tools are even in scope, and what they trigger. That is free and takes a couple of minutes.
Take the free, two-minute self-assessment. Five questions tell you whether your hiring tool is likely high-risk and what the first step is. No email needed to see your result, and no platform to buy.
Take the free 2-minute checkPrefer the obligations as editable files your team fills in and signs off? See the Toolkit (US$ 99, one-time, no subscription).
This is educational material and a starting point, not legal advice, and not a recommendation to buy or avoid any product. Whether a tool is in scope, and which obligations attach, depends on your facts; for that, consult a qualified lawyer. The EU AI Act is still evolving, and the high-risk timeline rests on an agreement not yet final in the Official Journal. Signato is not a law firm and does not certify compliance.
Every claim here is traced to the primary regulation and checked by a person before it goes out. We tell you what is settled, what is still open, and what to do next. How we work.