EU AI Act for Portuguese mid-market — your 2026 readiness checklist

If you sit between 50 and 500 employees, the EU AI Act puts you in the segment that has the obligations of larger firms but rarely the in-house compliance team to absorb them. From August 2026, the high-risk system regime under Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 begins active enforcement — and your enterprise customers, your tier-1 OEM partners, and your auditors will start asking specific, documented questions. This twelve-item checklist is the version we hand our own clients before a 90-day engagement: governance ownership, risk classification, data residency, vendor due diligence, technical documentation, transparency to users, model logging, human oversight, post-market monitoring, AI literacy, and the Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment. Each item cites the article it operationalises. It is sharper than the generic guidance you'll find elsewhere because it is calibrated to mid-market reality, not to a slide-deck.

• ·Twelve items mapped to the specific EU AI Act articles they operationalise.
• ·Calibrated for 50–500 employee companies — not a Fortune 500 framework rebadged.
• ·One-page A4 PDF, brand-styled, audit-ready.