ISO 42001 and AI Governance: The Compliance Story of 2026

If 2024 was the year everyone started building with AI and 2025 was the year they started worrying about it, 2026 is the year they are being asked to prove they have it under control. The proof point that has emerged faster than anyone expected is ISO 42001, the international standard for an AI management system. Published at the end of 2023, it spent its first two years as a curiosity discussed mostly by consultants. It is now showing up in procurement questionnaires and enterprise vendor reviews, and that changes everything about how seriously companies need to take it.

ISO 42001 is best understood by analogy to ISO 27001. Where 27001 defines a management system for information security, 42001 defines a management system for the responsible development and use of artificial intelligence. It is not a checklist of technical controls. It is a framework that asks an organisation to identify where AI creates risk, put policies and roles in place to manage that risk, monitor whether the controls are working, and improve them over time. The familiar plan, do, check, act cycle that underpins every ISO management system applies here too.

What makes the standard distinctive is its focus on impacts that traditional security frameworks ignore. ISO 42001 expects you to think about fairness and bias, transparency to the people affected by an AI system, human oversight of automated decisions, and the full lifecycle of a model from data collection through to retirement. These are exactly the concerns that a customer deploying your AI feature, or a regulator examining it, will raise. A SOC 2 report says nothing about whether your model discriminates. ISO 42001 is built precisely to address that gap.

The timing is not an accident. The EU AI Act began phasing in real obligations through 2025 and 2026, and high-risk AI systems now carry concrete legal duties around risk management, data governance and human oversight. ISO 42001 is rapidly becoming the practical way organisations demonstrate they are meeting the spirit of those duties. It is not a one-to-one mapping, and certification does not equal legal compliance, but an organisation that has built a genuine AI management system is in a vastly better position than one scrambling to answer regulators from a standing start.

For companies already certified to ISO 27001, the good news is that ISO 42001 reuses the same structural backbone, the so-called harmonised structure shared across ISO management system standards. The clauses on leadership, planning, support, operation and improvement will feel familiar, and the audit machinery, the internal audits and management reviews, slots into processes you already run. The new work is in the AI-specific controls in the standard annex: impact assessments, data quality for training, and the documentation that explains how each AI system behaves and why.

We are watching the compliance automation vendors move quickly to support this. Vanta, Drata, Sprinto and others have all announced or shipped ISO 42001 frameworks inside their platforms over the past year, mapping evidence collection and control monitoring to the standard the same way they did for SOC 2 and 27001. This matters because it lowers the cost of pursuing certification dramatically. The tooling that made SOC 2 affordable for small companies is now being pointed at AI governance, which means 42001 will not stay the preserve of large enterprises for long.

A word of caution, though. ISO 42001 is genuinely young, and the population of accredited certification bodies and experienced auditors is still thin. That has two consequences. First, the quality of audits varies more than it does for mature standards, so choosing a credible accredited body matters. Second, there is a real risk of governance theatre, of organisations buying a certificate that documents policies nobody follows. Because AI risk is concrete and visible, a hollow certification here is more dangerous than a hollow one elsewhere. The standard is only worth what the practice behind it is worth.

Who should pursue it now? If you sell an AI product into enterprises, the answer is almost certainly yes, and sooner than you think, because your buyers will start demanding it as a condition of the deal. If you merely use AI tools internally, the case is weaker but rising, particularly if you operate in a regulated sector or touch the European market. And if you build high-risk systems as the AI Act defines them, this is no longer optional in any meaningful sense. The question is not whether to engage with AI governance but how formally.

Our overall read is that ISO 42001 is the compliance story of 2026 because it sits at the exact intersection of three forces: regulators demanding accountability, enterprises demanding assurance from vendors, and a tooling ecosystem finally making certification practical. The companies that treat it as a genuine operating discipline, rather than a badge, will find it pays for itself in faster enterprise sales and fewer nasty surprises. The ones that treat it as paperwork will have spent money to document a risk they never actually managed.