What is an AI Helpdesk?
Using AI in your business raises legal and ethical questions. Is my system high-risk under the AI Act? Who is responsible for the data when customer questions flow through an LLM? Who is liable when the AI gets it wrong? The sustain.brussels AI Helpdesk is the first point of contact for Brussels SMEs with questions like these. It is free for eligible SMEs and consists of two meetings, ending with a roadmap of next steps and referrals. We offer guidance, not legal advice.
What this looks like in practice
VeriHub is a two-person Brussels start-up (Learn more). It audits how AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity describe businesses and organizations, checking whether answers are accurate, up to date and consistent across French, Dutch and English. It identifies issues, provides evidence-based recommendations and re-tests after changes, leaving the fixing of sources to the client.
The Process
In the first meeting, we went through the EDPB’s GDPR guidance for SMEs and the AI Act compliance checker together. Two questions emerged as important areas for further investigation: who is liable if an audit passes on wrong information, and whether real user questions from a client, such as a hospital, could contain personal data. VeriHub took these to an introductory meeting with legal scholars from VUB’s LSTS research group, and came back with five questions for our second meeting:
- Is VeriHub a provider or a deployer under the AI Act, or both?
- How are GDPR roles divided once real customer queries are used?
- What standard of care applies when audit findings are probabilistic?
- Where does AI assurance end and certification begin?
- Do organizations have a legal duty to monitor how AI assistants describe them?
For each question, VeriHub received the relevant legal provisions, what to check and a practical idea. VeriHub is now applying these insights to its audit methodology, reporting and governance processes as it works on its first paid pilot.
Part of a wider network
The Helpdesk does not work alone. When a question about the AI Act goes beyond what we can answer, we refer it to the EU AI Act Service Desk, with which we are in direct contact.
To get a solid grounding in the rules, we refer companies to ULB’s training track “AI Under EU Digital Law”, led by Valentina Dalla Giovanna, a legal researcher at FARI and practicing lawyer. It is a practical, non-technical introduction to the EU’s digital rules, spread over three days: an overview of the framework, then the GDPR and the Data Act, and finally the AI Act and liability. You work on real use cases, ideally your own, and leave with a checklist of main applicable regulations and a resource guide for ongoing compliance.
The next edition runs on 30 November, 1 December and 2 December 2026 at BeCentral, with a maximum of 20 participants, and is free for SMEs and midcaps (register here).
Have an AI question and no idea where to begin? Request guidance at sustain.brussels/ai-helpdesk.
This was made possible thanks to the co-funding of the Euorpean Commission and Brussels-capital region Innoviris.
AI Helpdesk: guidance on AI risk and compliance