A 'serious incident' under the EU AI Act needs a response plan. We had a panic, not a plan.

The first time I imagined a serious-incident scenario under the EU AI Act, I realized we had exactly one response process: someone pings the group chat and we figure it out live. That is fine for a broken deploy and catastrophic for a regulated notification duty. Article 26(5) and Article 73 point deployers and providers at a notification path with timelines attached, and "we'll sort it out" is not a path. The thing I needed wasn't a lawyer on retainer — it was a shape for the response before the incident, so the panic didn't eat the clock.

The honest case for drafting the playbook before you need it

IncidentKit takes a serious-incident scenario you describe and returns a playbook draft built around those two articles: a readiness read on how prepared you look, the notification path the regulation points to, and the evidence gaps you'd be scrambling to fill at 2am. You paste the scenario; you get a draft you can walk through once, calmly, instead of discovering the steps during the event.

It is decision-support, not a filed notification. The value is rehearsal: knowing which article points where, what you'd need to show, and where your current evidence is thin, before a regulator-adjacent deadline is already running. A team that has read its own playbook once responds differently than a team reading the articles for the first time under pressure.

What it deliberately does not do

• It is not legal advice. The notification path is drawn from Articles 26(5) and 73 as a draft; whether a given event qualifies as "serious" is a judgment the tool can't make for you.
• It does not submit anything to an authority. The playbook is yours to operationalize; the actual notification is a human decision with human sign-off.
• It cannot verify your facts. The readiness read depends entirely on the scenario you paste; a thin or optimistic description yields a misleadingly rosy draft.
• It does not track incidents after you close the tab. This is a planning draft, not a live incident-response system.

If your serious-incident plan is currently "we'll figure it out," IncidentKit is $19/mo and trades the panic for a draft you can rehearse once. The deadline, if it ever comes, will thank you.