The delegation

International standards are drafted by ISO — the International Organization for Standardization — inside technical committees made up of delegates nominated by their national standards bodies. For artificial intelligence, that committee is ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42.

I sit on SC 42 as a United States delegate. The work is unpaid, painstaking, and consequential: every clause debated in the working group becomes, once published, the language auditors, regulators, and boards will reach for when they ask whether an AI system is being managed responsibly.

Standards on the workbench

The SC 42 portfolio is broad. The four documents most central to my work are:

  • ISO/IEC 42001 — the requirements standard for an AI management system. This is the certifiable one. Every clause here becomes an audit question in the field.
  • ISO/IEC 23894 — guidance on AI risk management. The companion document that gives 42001’s risk clauses their operational teeth.
  • ISO/IEC 42005 — guidance on AI system impact assessment. The instrument for reasoning about consequences beyond the organisation itself.
  • ISO/IEC 42006 — requirements for the certification bodies that will assess conformance to 42001. In other words: the rules for the auditors.

Adjacent workstreams — governance, bias, transparency, environmental impact of AI — feed back into the flagship documents through cross-committee liaison.

Why this shapes the advisory work

Being in the room where a clause is drafted is different from reading it after the fact. The intent, the compromises, the language considered and rejected — all of it stays visible. When the Institute advises an organisation on how to implement a particular control, the reading is grounded in why the clause exists, not just what it says.

This is the connective tissue between standards work and advisory practice. It is why the Institute exists.

What comes next

ISO/IEC 42001 is now in wide circulation and the first waves of certification are producing evidence about what works and what does not. That feedback loop is beginning to flow back into revision cycles. The next few years will see the standard mature — driven by audit findings, regulator interpretation, and the certification-body community coalescing around common practice.

The best way to follow that maturing view is Field Notes.