Dutch telemarketing rules and AI agents
RavinaroCan an AI agent call Dutch consumers?
Not without consent. The Netherlands moved to an opt-in regime for telemarketing to consumers, which means you need permission before you call rather than relying on someone not having opted out.
We do not build outbound cold-callers in any market, so in practice this does not arise for our clients. The agents we build answer people who contacted you first, which is a different activity under any of these frameworks.
General orientation, not legal advice.
What about calling businesses rather than consumers?
The rules differ between consumer and business contacts, and the boundary is less obvious than it looks — a sole trader using a personal mobile is not clearly one or the other.
Rather than navigate that per call, the safer design is to only ever respond. If somebody filled in your form or messaged your number, following up is not cold outreach. If you bought their details, it is, whatever the segment says.
Does the EU AI Act apply on top of this?
Yes, and they answer different questions. The Dutch rules govern whether you may make the call. Article 50 of the EU AI Act governs whether the person must be told they are talking to an AI, and its transparency provisions apply from 2 August 2026.
Every agent we build already discloses on every call and in its first message on every channel, so that date is not a deadline for anything.
How does this sit with GDPR?
Recording and transcribing calls is processing personal data, so the ordinary obligations apply: a lawful basis, notice before recording, a defined retention period, and a data processing agreement if you want one.
You own the recordings, the transcripts and the conversation data. The agent tells callers it records at the start of the call, which is also where the notice obligation is easiest to satisfy.
Sources
The rules quoted above come from the primary sources below. They are the law itself, not a summary of it — worth reading before you rely on anything here. This page is general information, not legal advice.
- Telecommunicatiewet, Article 11.7 (in force 1 July 2021) — Article 11.7(1) bans unsolicited automated calling without demonstrable prior consent; 11.7(2) extends the same prior-consent rule to calls placed by other means to natural persons.
- ACM — stricter telemarketing rules from 1 July — The Dutch regulator for telemarketing is the Autoriteit Consument & Markt. Consumers and small businesses may only be called with explicit consent, and the caller must be able to prove it.
- Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens — direct marketing and recording — The Dutch DPA states that direct marketing needs a legal basis under the AVG, and that a caller must be told at the start of a call that it is being recorded.
- GDPR, Article 6 — lawfulness of processing — Regulation (EU) 2016/679. Processing is lawful only where at least one of six bases applies.
Written by Ravinaro
We build AI receptionists, WhatsApp agents and booking automation for small businesses. If this post raised a question about your own setup, a short call answers it faster than a search.
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