AI management: transforming fear into control with an ISO 42001 certification strategy
Finally, who's afraid of AI? If you are, let's pull out the ultimate weapon: management. Benevolent, inclusive, participative management if you like... but management nonetheless.
Because AI is neither a magic wand nor a "separate" risk: it's a powerful technology that requires clear governance, responsibilities, processes and evidence.
This is precisely what ISO/IEC 42001, the first international standard for an AI management system, offers.
More than just complying with a standard, we can help you turn it into a lever for business strategy, growth and differentiation.
Why now?
AI is creeping in everywhere: editorial assistants, scoring, recommendations, fraud detection, code co-pilots, image processing, internal chatbots. Without a framework, you expose the company to major risks:
- Quality & reliability: hallucinations, performance drifts, poorly validated models.
- Security & confidentiality: training data leaks, sensitive prompts, exfiltration via plugins.
- Bias & discrimination: unfair decisions, damaged reputation, litigation.
- Regulatory compliance: sector-specific requirements, documentation of choices, traceability.
- Intellectual property & content: poor control of source data, output rights.
- Supplier dependencies: opaque models and APIs, unprepared reversibility.
- Operations: incidents, downtime, lack of human-in-the-loop plan.
The role of management, via 42001, is to make these risks visible, measurable and controllable, then to prove, through evidence, that the organization has mastered its use of AI.
But beyond these risks, perhaps the most important is the one that makes you not make this transition to AI.
As with any approach, it's important to take a positive approach, not to be restrictive, but to move forward by managing risk.
What it means to "manage AI
Managing AI means setting up pragmatic governance that lasts over time.
Above all, it means understanding the major impact of AI in our organizations and seizing the opportunity to build a controlled transformation plan.
How can ISO 42001 help us in this process?
Whether for internal processes or for the company's products and services, this is an opportunity for a voluntary, controlled plan.
In concrete terms :
- Governance & roles
- Define roles from startup to runtime
- Appoint a sponsor, an AI steering function (AIO), and owners for each use case.
- Define who decides what (orientations, objectives...)
- Prioritize - use case register
- Inventory all AI uses (internal, suppliers, no/low-code).
- Classify by business criticality, data involved, external exposure.
- IA risk assessment
- Analyze AI-specific risks (quality, bias, safety, compliance, ethics).
- Require measurements and acceptance criteria before deployment.
- Lifecycle management
- Plan Do Check Act logic
- Mastering AI deployment
- Supervision & human control
- Define when humans should intervene, with what powers of refusal/cancellation.
- define clear processes
- Data & model governance
- Source, quality, minimization and security of training and prompt data.
- Traceability of model versions, parameters and test sets.
- Continuous improvement
- Results monitoring process
- Management reviews, internal audits, indicators, improvement plans.
- Culture & skills
- Targeted team training (business, technical, legal, safety).
- User guides, practical examples, feedback.
ISO/IEC 42001 at a glance: the international framework
ISO/IEC 42001 defines the requirements of an AI Management System (AIMS), on the same principle as well-known management standards (ISO 9001 for quality, ISO 27001 for security). Its promise: an auditable, risk-based framework for deploying AI in a responsible, controlled way.
Key points:
- AI policy & objectives aligned with strategy.
- Risk-based approach: identification, assessment, treatment, acceptance criteria.
- Processes covering the lifecycle of AI systems (from idea to operation).
- Roles, responsibilities, skills and awareness.
- Document control & evidence (traceability, logs, decisions).
- Monitoring, internal audit, management review for continuous improvement.
Concrete benefits
- Confidence for your customers, partners and regulators: you demonstrate your due diligence.
- Efficiency: you avoid tinkering, late revalidations and costly incidents.
- Transversality: the framework integrates easily with ISO 27001, 9001, 27701, etc.
The Feel Agile approach
Our approach is to use the standard as a gas pedal of transformation and as a means of adding value.
Accelerating AI
By controlling the risks and reassuring the players and stakeholders involved in AI, we can create the conditions for success.
Success also depends on the structure of the project and its follow-up with concrete objectives.
We're going to develop a real transformation strategy!
Adding value to AI
Throughout the project, this enables the company to better master the challenges of AI and reap its full commercial benefits:
- improving services and products
- competitive advantages
- ability to talk about it and be visible on the subject
Once certification has been obtained, it is of course a real commercial advantage and a business lever, a means of reassuring your ecosystem.
Together, let's build agile compliance and, above all, growth!
