“The hope is to have shared guidelines and harmonized rules: few rules, clear and forward-looking,” says Marco Valentini, group public affairs director at Engineering, an Italian company that is a member of the AI Pact. “We hope to work closely with the AI Office to achieve these goals. The EU has completed a very important initiative by approving one of the world’s first regulations on AI, in an anthropocentric function, protecting fundamental rights and guaranteeing innovation,” Valentini continues. “For this reason, the AI Act is a very nuanced regulation, and an initiative like the AI Pact should help companies clarify its practical application because it brings forward compliance on some key provisions.”
“There are so many laws on digital that the previous European Commission passed: the new Commission is aware of the vastness of the framework and has every intention of helping companies with compliance,” says Matteo Quattrocchi, head of EU AI policy at Cisco, a company that also entered the pact. “The AI Act is complex in that it is the first cross-cutting AI law in the world and companies will have to dedicate a specific focus on AI for the first time, but with intersections with the Data Act, GDPR and other laws as well. It is not easy to master this framework, and AI Pact can also help with the guidance provided by the AI Office.”
According to Alessandro Proietti, customer experience and innovation director of The Adecco Group Italy, another AI Pact member, the AI Act is “a complex, but necessary law: the EU has rightly intervened to regulate AI not in a way that blocks it but to define the perimeter within which it can be used.”
