Article 50 of the EU AI Act brings new transparency expectations to the customer-facing uses of AI.
As AI becomes more embedded across sales, marketing and service journeys, the next priority is ensuring customers are aware when it is used.
CX leaders should treat disclosure as part of experience design, ensuring it remains clear, timely and connected to a route to human support.
Colleen Jones, President at Content Science, explained to CX Today that transparency should be designed into the customer experience from the first interaction, rather than treated as a disclosure added after the fact.
“The test should be whether a reasonable customer can tell, without having to stop and investigate, that they’re interacting with AI,” she said.
“Transparency works best when it is immediate, plain-language, and part of the experience, not buried in a policy.”
Article 50 Brings AI Disclosure Into Focus
Having taken effect on August 2nd, Article 50 was one of the first sections to become applicable, as this aims to solve the narrower and more immediate customer-facing issue: encountering AI.
Now, people must be informed when they are interacting with AI, requiring generated or manipulated content to be marked or labeled as these rules are intended to reduce deception and manipulation, and help people make informed choices.
Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, reinforced ethe importance of transparency as AI becomes more embedded in customer-facing experiences.
“With today’s guidelines, the Commission supports the smooth and effective application of the AI Act to make AI systems interacting with people such as chatbots and AI agents and AI content more transparent and trustworthy.”
“These guidelines support providers and deployers in meeting their obligations under the AI Act, while helping citizens know when they are interacting with AI.”
As AI agents become more involved in customer service, sales, and marketing, this article becomes increasingly relevant to how brands build and maintain customer trust.
If customers feel they have been misled, brand confidence can suffer and potentially affect engagement, conversion, and retention, and clear disclosure can give customers the information they need to decide how much they trust an AI.
The New Disclosure Test for AI Sales Agents
Article 50 aims to bring transparency into the earliest stages of the buyer journey, requiring customer-facing AI system providers to inform them that they are interacting with AI, unless objectively obvious.
For sales and marketing teams, this article puts a spotlight on whether prospective customers can recognise its role before they rely on an interaction to decide.
Speaking with CX Today, Jessy Van Steenkiste, Senior Global Counsel for Regulatory Compliance Product, Privacy, and AI Governance at Parloa, argues that businesses should be cautious about relying on the exception for interactions where AI is considered obvious.
“Sales and marketing leaders should treat obvious as a low bar to lean on and a high bar to prove,” she stated.
For an AI sales agent handling the customer journey, assuming customers will recognize the technology themselves could create an unnecessary gap between a brand’s expectations and its CX.
Furthermore, as AI agents become increasingly capable of replicating natural conversations, a customer may enter a ‘human-appearing’ conversation without realizing that an automated system is responsible for the responses.
“If your customer caller has to ask ‘wait, am I talking to a bot?’, you may have successfully rolled out a remarkably lifelike automated journey, but the moment for transparency and establishing trust already passed,” she cautioned.
This requires disclosures being placed at the beginning of the interaction, whilst also providing a clear escalation route when a customer wants human assistance.
As Van Steenkiste warns:
“Name the AI, name the company, and offer a human within one line.”
The first disclosure can ultimately shape how customers interpret a conversation and how much confidence they place in the information received.
Deepfakes Raise the Stakes for Marketing Trust
Secondly, providers of generative AI systems must ensure synthetic audio, images, video and text outputs are marked in a machine-readable and detectable format, where technically feasible.
Furthermore, deployers now have obligations to disclose AI-generated or manipulated image, audio and video content that qualifies as a deepfake.
For sales and marketing teams, this creates an important distinction between using AI to assist content production and using it to create something that could make an audience believe a real person said, did or endorsed something that never happened.
In conversation with CX Today, Suvish Viswanathan, Head of Marketing at Zoho suggests businesses can establish practical internal boundaries around these uses.
“A practical and internal rule for sales and marketing is stock imagery and editing of a real photo or video shoot using AI steers clear of deepfake territory,” he said.
This allows teams to continue using AI for routine creative tasks while drawing greater scrutiny around fabricated content.
However, this risk becomes more significant when AI could infactually endorse a product, or a cloned executive voice makes a statement from a company leader.
Viswanathan emphasized:
“Where the line starts to be crossed is when AI starts to create voiceovers pretending to be people and fabricated customer testimonials.”
For sales and marketing leaders, this creates concern over authenticity and customer trust, as even where synthetic content may appear harmless, audiences may interpret it differently if they are unaware that AI was used to create it.
“Content like this must have an explicit label stating the use of AI regardless of how flattering or low stakes the content seems,” he concluded.
As a result, clear labelling can help distinguish legitimate AI-assisted creativity from misleading content.
Community Automation Needs a Clear Identity
With more customer journeys now beginning in online communities, brands are increasingly using AI to manage these interactions.
Article 50 extends the transparency question into social selling and community engagement, requiring clear and distinguishable information so businesses must consider how customers are informed when an AI system is responding.
Dr. Islam Gouda, Global Brand Ambassador for Marketing at revenue marketing alliance told CX Today that businesses should view this as part of the wider customer relationship.
“AI disclosure should not be treated merely as a compliance requirement; it should become part of an organization’s customer-trust architecture,” he said.
For social selling teams, this means considering whether an AI agent should be presented as an automated assistant instead of a named salesperson or community manager.
In fact, the value of disclosure may ultimately rest on whether knowing AI is involved would alter how a customer interprets or responds to the interaction.
Gouda suggests:
“Would knowing that AI is involved reasonably change how this customer interprets, trusts, or responds to this interaction?”
AI also creates commercial implications by allowing sales and community teams to handle more conversations at scale.
“AI can scale the interaction, but trust determines whether the relationship and therefore the revenue is durable,” he highlighted.
For brands, Article 50 creates opportunities to build social engagement disclosure in a way that preserves the efficiency of AI while making its role clear to the customer.
Turning AI Disclosure Into a Business Process
Article 50 creates a practical distinction between the companies that provide AI systems and the organizations that deploy them, making sales and marketing teams responsible for how they use AI tools instead of how they were developed.
However, this does not remove the need to assess vendor AI products, requiring them to assess whether they support appropriate disclosure, machine-readable marking and reliable content provenance, particularly when AI-generated material becomes part of customer-facing campaigns or sales activity.
Gene Foca, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer at Getty Images, highlighted to CX Today that this requires businesses to consider how transparency fits into their wider operations.
“The most forward-thinking organizations are treating AI transparency as a trust issue, not just a compliance issue,” he said.
This requires continued assessment into transparency when AI tools are procured, campaigns are created, sales materials are produced, and customer interactions are managed.
Foca noted:
“A more comprehensive approach is to build transparency into content workflows from the outset.”
Rather than relying on European guidelines and rules, enterprises should establish clear internal rules for labeling AI-generated content, documenting how content was created, and defining when human review or escalation is required.
This can help teams manage the legal and reputational implications of AI-generated sales and marketing content, as Article 50 sits alongside existing requirements for broader governance environment for customer-facing AI.
“The greater the transparency in the content supply chain, the easier it becomes to apply governance processes consistently, mitigate legal and reputational risk, and maintain customer trust,” he explained.
For sales and marketing leaders, this requires making transparency a repeatable part of the operating model as AI becomes embedded across the journey.
Can Article 50 Deliver Meaningful AI Transparency?
Recieving a largely positive response on August 2nd, the EU AI act marks a significant step toward making AI interactions and AI-generated content more identifiable to the public, welcomed as a practical move toward greater transparency.
However, concerns around transparency for many EU residents remain a top priority, and if the European commission can keep up with the ever-growing AI landscape
One respondent on LinkedIn commented: “Labelling AI won’t stop deception; bad actors won’t label fraud, scams, propaganda, or deepfakes.
“What it will do is burden legitimate creators, startups, journalists, developers, and small businesses with compliance rituals while the worst offenders ignore the rules completely.”
Another user wrote about their concern for the shortage of leaders overseeing the ever-growing AI landscape.
They noted: “We are investing heavily in AI literacy, governance, and compliance, which are all fundamental. But who is investing in AI leadership?”
While a welcoming starting point, the effectiveness of Article 50 will depend on how well its requirements translate into meaningful, consistent experiences.
Organizations will also need to treat transparency as an ongoing responsibility, meaning success will be measured by whether customers can understand when AI is involved and make informed decisions about how they engage with it.
