For a small business in the EU or selling into it, the Digital Omnibus political agreement of 7 May 2026 pushes the heavy high-risk obligations out to 2 December 2027 and 2 August 2028 but does not change the duties most small businesses are actually subject to: as a deployer rather than a provider, you must disclose AI-generated deepfake image, audio, or video and ensure AI chat tells people they are talking to a machine from 2 August 2026 under Article 50, you have been under the Article 4 AI literacy duty since 2 February 2025, and a 30-minute readiness check using tools you already have closes most of the practical gap.

Operator-register sibling to AM-184. Anchored on the Council of the EU press release of 7 May 2026 on the Digital Omnibus provisional agreement and on the official EU AI Act application timeline (prohibited practices and AI literacy applicable 2 Feb 2025; GPAI and governance applicable 2 Aug 2025; Article 50 deployer transparency obligations applicable 2 Aug 2026; high-risk obligations postponed to 2 Dec 2027 Annex III and 2 Aug 2028 Annex I; Article 50(2) provider watermarking postponed to 2 Dec 2026). The Omnibus also introduces a small mid-cap category and reduced administrative burden for smaller organisations. Claim is scoped to the operator-level readiness posture a 1-50 person deployer can reach with existing tools and about 30 minutes, and to the distinction between provider and deployer duties; it is house reading, not legal advice, and a small business processing personal data or operating an Annex III use case (for example AI in hiring) should take specific advice. 45-day review cadence (12 Jul 2026), set before the 2 Aug 2026 milestone so the readiness push lands in time. Trigger conditions: (1) the provisional agreement fails or changes in formal adoption, altering the dates; (2) the Commission or a member-state authority issues SME-specific guidance on the Article 50 deployer duties; (3) a competent authority publishes enforcement priorities that change the small-business calculus; (4) the small mid-cap relief is defined in a way that changes which businesses qualify. Siblings: AM-184 (the enterprise version of the delay-versus-still-applies reading), /operators/ai-hiring-smb-eu-ai-act-annex-iii/ (the Annex III hiring duty this delay re-times), /operators/ai-solo-dev-eu-client-code-residency/ (the residency cut).