Cite as: Real Problem AI problem “Why can't a ten-person company answer a customer's AI Act questionnaire?”. Opportunity score 8.0 out of 10 (severity 8, AI feasibility 8, market signal 8, competition gap 8). Category LegalTech & Compliance. Trend LLM. Source signal: r/AI_Governance thread on the AI Act literacy obligation for smaller companies, 20 August 2026, 21 comments; r/Entrepreneurs thread on a first EU AI Act customer questionnaire, 6 March 2026.. Canonical URL: https://www.realproblem.ai/archive/why-cant-a-ten-person-company-answer-a-customers-ai-act-questionnaire.
Why can't a ten-person company answer a customer's AI Act questionnaire?
A small vendor that added AI features gets a twelve-question compliance questionnaire from its first EU customer and has no risk classification, no AI inventory and no literacy evidence to point at, so the deal stalls on paperwork nobody on the team can produce.
Who has it: Founders and operators at small software companies selling into the EU, plus the compliance staff answering for AI tools the team already uses.
- Severity8/10
- Feasible today8/10
- Market signal8/10
- Competition gap8/10
What people report
Small vendors describe receiving their first EU customer's AI Act questionnaire and being unable to answer most of the questions with confidence.
Our summary of the public post linked below, not a quote. Nobody submitted it to Real Problem AI.
r/AI_Governance thread on the AI Act literacy obligation for smaller companies, 20 August 2026, 21 comments; r/Entrepreneurs thread on a first EU AI Act customer questionnaire, 6 March 2026.What nothing does yet
A living AI register that detects which tools in the stack shipped AI features this quarter, classifies each use by risk tier, generates the transparency notice and the literacy completion record, then answers a customer questionnaire from that stored evidence instead of from memory.
Tools that solve this
3 named so far, and where each one stops.
- Vanta and Drata
Strong on SOC 2 and ISO 27001, and their AI Act modules still assume a human has already done the classification work.
- Law-firm readiness reviews
Accurate, priced for enterprises, and out of date the moment a vendor in the stack ships a new AI feature.
- An internal spreadsheet
What most small teams actually keep, and no enterprise buyer accepts it as evidence.
Why it is archived
Trimmed to 100-cap (lowest opportunity_score among older entries)
How you might build it
- 01SaaS discovery to inventory AI features across the stack
- 02Risk-tier classification against the Act's categories
- 03Generated transparency notice and disclosure copy
- 04Literacy training log with per-employee completion evidence
- 05Questionnaire answering grounded in the stored evidence
#N27D · Canonical URL: https://www.realproblem.ai/archive/why-cant-a-ten-person-company-answer-a-customers-ai-act-questionnaire