How long should AI literacy training take?
There is no legal minimum. A baseline for people who use AI tools takes about half a day when it is built on your own tool inventory, and people who configure, procure or oversee AI need a second session of role-specific depth. Length matters less than whether the session named your tools and their risks. Article 4 asks for measures that support AI literacy, calibrated to the people and the context; it never mentions hours.
Why is there no set number of hours?
Because the duty is about fit. The rewritten Article 4 tells providers and deployers to take account of technical knowledge, experience, education and training, and the context in which the AI systems are used. The Commission's Q&A on AI literacy says there is no obligation to measure employees' knowledge and no need for a certificate, and it warns that simply relying on the instructions for use might be ineffective. A two-hour session that walks through your three tools with the people who use them does more than a two-day course on AI in general.
How long does a baseline take?
In our experience, three and a half hours. That is enough to cover the law as it stands, your role as a deployer, an inventory of the tools in use mapped to risk, and the specific failure modes of those tools with examples from your own work. Shorter than that and the examples get cut, which is the part people remember. Longer and you are teaching things the users do not need.
How long does role-specific depth take?
Another two to three hours for the people who configure, procure or oversee AI, which is why our full day runs to six hours. That time goes to what the settings do, what the vendor says a human reviewer should do with the output, and drafting an acceptable-use policy with the people who will have to live with it. Deployers of high-risk systems have a separate and deeper obligation under Article 26 to assign oversight to people with the necessary competence, training and authority, and that is a distinct engagement.
Does a ninety-minute session count?
It can, for a narrow purpose. A ninety-minute follow-up three to six months after the baseline, covering what has changed and the situations people have actually hit, is a good measure and a fresh dated record entry. A ninety-minute session as the only thing you ever do, for everyone, regardless of role, is thin, and the record will show that it was thin.
Does a one-hour e-learning module count?
The hour is rarely the problem. A generic module cannot do the Commission's fourth step, which is to build your actions on an analysis of your own role, systems and risks. If the module never names your tools, the record that comes out of it never names them either.
The half day, full day and follow-up tiers are sized to those answers.
Sources
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the AI Act, Article 4 and Article 26, as amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744.
- European Commission, AI literacy: questions and answers, the passages on testing, certificates, instructions for use and the four-step approach.
This is general information about the EU AI Act, not legal advice. Enforcement is proportionate and case by case, and your sectoral regulator may issue guidance that applies to you.
