Drift is a chat platform, not a legal category. The EU AI Act doesn't ask which vendor's software runs your chat widget. It asks whose name is on the AI system a visitor actually talks to.
The Act distinguishes a provider (places an AI system on the market under its own name or brand) from a deployer (uses a system under its own authority). If Drift's AI chatbot sits on your site under your company's name, with your logo, your bot name, and your greeting, you are generally the provider of that system for the Article 50(1) disclosure duty, even though Drift built the technology. The duty to tell visitors they're talking to AI sits with you, not with Drift.
That means: a clear AI notice at or before the first interaction, in the interface itself. A first-message line, a persistent badge near the chat window, or both. The Commission's draft guidelines explicitly list burying it in terms & conditions as insufficient on its own. Embedded website helpdesk and sales bots are also the draft guidelines' core example of a bot that is not "obvious from context", so don't count on the exemption.
One configuration detail that matters on Drift specifically: playbooks that only route visitors through fixed, scripted button choices, with no AI generating responses, are a different animal from AI-powered conversation. The duty attaches to AI systems interacting with people; a purely pre-scripted decision tree is much less likely to qualify. The moment Drift's AI features answer visitors in free text under your brand, assume the duty applies.
The fix costs a sentence and a badge. If you want paste-ready wording in English, German, and French, the free disclosure generator produces it from the Commission's own example wording in the draft guidelines.
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