ISO/IEC 42005 Revolutionizes AI Impact Assessment

🧠 What’s Covered

• Standard Scope: ISO/IEC 42005 is the first international standard focused exclusively on AI impact assessment—spanning societal, individual, and organizational consequences.
• Eight Impact Dimensions: Accountability, transparency, fairness, privacy, reliability, safety, explainability, and environmental impact are explicitly identified (page 3).
• Ontology Mapping: The authors built a SKOS-based ontology aligning ISO risk concepts with common taxonomies used in privacy, security, and compliance—supporting seamless integration across governance processes (page 4).
• New Risk Categories: Includes AI/ML-specific issues like data drift, explanation failures, and unsustainable system behaviors (page 5).
• Implementation Example: Signatu’s platform operationalizes the standard with features like automated risk identification, cross-framework integration, and stakeholder mapping (pages 6–7).
• Process Guidance: It walks through real-world lifecycle integration, stakeholder engagement, threshold management, documentation, and reassessment checkpoints (pages 8–14).
• Benefits & Case Study: Demonstrates reduced assessment time (by 45%), improved consistency, and better cross-border alignment in a financial services case (page 25).

💡 Why It Matters?

ISO/IEC 42005 is positioned to become a foundational pillar for AI governance, especially under the EU AI Act. The emphasis on interoperability means assessments done under this standard can feed into other frameworks like GDPR, ISO 27001, or sector-specific audits—streamlining compliance and reducing duplication.

This document doesn’t just present the standard—it showcases how it can be used immediately, what tooling supports it, and why it raises the bar on trust and accountability.

🧱 What’s Missing

• Critical perspectives: The tone is overwhelmingly positive and promotional. There’s no engagement with the limits of standardization in dynamic AI contexts, nor any reflection on cost, complexity, or adoption challenges beyond a brief note on implementation difficulties (page 26).
• Open access to standard: The full ISO/IEC 42005 isn’t included or freely linked. Readers must purchase it to apply the framework directly.
• Real-world diversity: One case study (a global credit scoring deployment) is insightful but not enough to fully demonstrate the standard’s adaptability across sectors.

✅ Best For

• AI governance and risk professionals seeking to align with emerging global norms
• Compliance and legal teams preparing for EU AI Act readiness
• Product owners embedding AI ethics into lifecycle workflows
• Tool vendors and platform providers building assurance layers for AI systems

🔍 Source Details

Title: Breaking: ISO/IEC 42005 Revolutionizes AI Impact Assessment
Author: Georg Philip Krog
Date: 2025
Pages: 30
Published by: Signatu