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The EU AI Act regulates the use of artificial intelligence in the EU. This article shows where Honestly uses AI, who reviews the results, where the data is processed and how you switch AI features off for your account.

Our classification

In our assessment, Honestly is a limited-risk AI system, not a high-risk AI system. Honestly makes no automated personnel decisions: the AI features analyze feedback and make suggestions, and decisions about people are always made by people. Honestly is the provider of the AI system. Your company is the deployer as soon as it uses the AI features. This can bring obligations of its own, such as informing employees about the use of AI. Clarify them with your data protection officer or legal counsel.

Which AI features there are

For more on data masking, see Data masking.

Human oversight

No AI feature in Honestly makes decisions about people. Topics, sentiment and summaries are analysis aids: they are generated automatically, and the people reading the results decide what conclusions to draw from them. Initiative recommendations are explicitly suggestions that you adopt, adapt or discard.

No emotion recognition

The AI Act prohibits AI systems that recognize emotions in the workplace. This means systems that infer emotions from biometric data, such as facial expressions or voice. Sentiment AI in Honestly only analyzes the written text of open comments. According to the European Commission’s guidelines on prohibited AI practices, sentiment analysis of text does not fall under this prohibition. With speech-to-text, spoken words are only turned into text, and only that text is analyzed afterwards.

Where the data is processed

  • The AI features run on Microsoft Azure (Azure OpenAI, operated through Azure AI Foundry), and so does speech-to-text.
  • The subprocessor is Microsoft Deutschland GmbH, with servers located exclusively in the EU.
  • Connections are encrypted, and stored data is encrypted with 256-bit AES. Details are in the IT security & data protection FAQ.

Switching AI features off

Surveys and dashboards work without the AI features. As an admin, you decide which of them are active in your account:
  1. Open Account Settings → Features.
  2. Click Disable next to the feature.
The feature is then hidden for all users in your account. Under Account Settings → Subprocessors you also control whether Microsoft may be used as a subprocessor for your account. Consent is given by default. Without it, data masking, speech-to-text, Automatic Topic Analysis, the AI analysis in 360° feedback and the automatic research for the company context, among others, are not available.
Turning Microsoft off under Subprocessors does not on its own switch off every AI feature – for example, not AI-Powered Open Text Summarization or AI Initiative Recommendations. If you do not want to use AI features, also disable them one by one under Features.

Documents for your works council and data protection

For your discussions with the works council and data protection officer, we are happy to provide the data processing agreement (DPA), the technical and organizational measures (TOMs), technical descriptions and the list of subprocessors, and to support you with the data protection impact assessment (DPIA). Write to support@honestly.com.