Deferred is not exempt — Adecco puts candidate-selection agents in 40 countries, and the clock that moved is not the one that binds

On 15 September 2026 the Adecco Group announced the rollout of Salesforce's Agentforce Coworker, powered by Anthropic's Claude, to 27,000 employees across 40 of the 60 countries in which the group operates, following a pilot in the United Kingdom and France.

Why it mattersIt is the deployment scale that decides whether this is a pilot question or a records-of-processing question. Forty countries and 27,000 users is the second.

theadeccogr2026adecco · salesforce2026salesforc

In recruitment, Adecco's agents select candidates and launch pre-screening, recruiter and onboarding agents; ten countries already run agentic AI in recruitment and account for 50% of group business revenues; 2.5 million agent-candidate interactions have taken place since April 2025.

Why it matters'Select candidates' and 'pre-screening' are the two verbs that decide the legal classification. They are the company's own words, not a characterisation.

theadeccogr2026adecco

Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the Digital Omnibus on AI, adopted 8 July 2026 and in force since 27 July 2026, amends Regulations (EU) 2024/1689, (EU) 2018/1139 and (EU) 2023/1230. It does not amend Regulation (EU) 2016/679.

Why it mattersThis is checkable in ten seconds from the title of the regulation, and it is the whole argument: the instrument that moved the deadline has no reach into data protection law.

eurlex2026regulatio · whiteandcas2026eu

The Digital Omnibus on AI defers Annex III stand-alone high-risk obligations to 2 December 2027 and Annex I safety-component obligations to 2 August 2028, while Article 50 transparency obligations continue to apply from 2 August 2026 and are not deferred.

Why it mattersThe deferral is real and worth planning around — but only for the obligations it actually names.

whiteandcas2026eu · eurlex2026regulatio

The GDPR amendments proposed in the separate Digital Omnibus on data, including the proposed rewrite of Article 22 on automated decision-making, remain under negotiation in the European Parliament and Council and are not in force.

Why it mattersTeams are already designing against the proposed Article 22 as though it were law. It is not, and a design that only works under it has no legal basis today.

whiteandcas2026eu

AI Act Annex III, point 4(a), covers AI systems intended to be used for the recruitment or selection of natural persons, in particular to place targeted job advertisements, to analyse and filter job applications, and to evaluate candidates.

Why it mattersFiltering applications and evaluating candidates is the Annex III text verbatim. There is no interpretive gap to argue in.

publication2024regulatio · euartificia2024annex

AI Act Article 6(3) exempts an Annex III system that performs a narrow procedural task or a preparatory task to an assessment, but its final subparagraph provides that an Annex III system performing profiling of natural persons is always to be considered high-risk.

Why it mattersThe exemption most teams will reach for is (d), preparatory task — and the same paragraph closes it for anything that profiles. That is the sentence to read before writing the assessment.

publication2024regulatio

In Case C-634/21, SCHUFA Holding (Scoring), judgment of 7 December 2023, the Court of Justice held that the automated establishment of a probability value constitutes automated individual decision-making within Article 22(1) GDPR where a third party to whom it is transmitted draws strongly on it.

Why it mattersAn agent that only ranks, never rejects, is not outside Article 22 if the human downstream follows the ranking. The design question is whether the human actually diverges from it.

courtofjust2023judgment · eurlex2016regulatio

Article 26(7) of the AI Act requires deployers who are employers to inform workers' representatives and the affected workers before putting a high-risk AI system into service at the workplace.

Why it mattersThis one genuinely is dated December 2027, and it is a conversation with a works council rather than a filing — which takes longer to arrange than a document does to write.

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