Introduce and scope AIUC-1

Identify the right client

The job: find the agent worth certifying, and the reason its owner moves now.Most clients have several AI agents. Only some are worth a certification, and the difference is how much damage it can do.

Filter	What to look for
Blast radius	The agent is critical to the business and brand is on the line when it fails
Capability	The agent holds sensitive data, or acts through tools like a CRM or payment processing
Obligation	The agent is subject to legal, compliance, or stakeholder requirements. An AI recruitment system classified as high-risk under the EU AI Act may require third-party validation before deployment

Two accelerants worth checking before the first call.An agent already inside an ISO 42001 scope carries roughly 20-30% overlap with AIUC-1 evidence. That shortens evidence collection materially, and it means the client has already decided AI assurance is worth paying for.Certification converts into shorter security and procurement cycles on enterprise deals, plus a co-marketing moment. That’s the outcome the client is buying, so that’s what to open on.Next: book the introduction meeting.

Introduce AIUC-1

The job: make the client see a gap they can’t close with what they already have.Open on the gap.Every client already holds frameworks that govern how AI systems are built and how people are meant to interact with them. None of them look at what the agent actually does once it’s live.

Risk area	Existing frameworks	AIUC-1
How AI systems behave in production	None	Covered
How AI systems are built	NIST AI RMF, OWASP Top Ten, MITRE ATLAS, CSA AICM	Covered
How humans interact with AI systems	ISO 42001, EU AI Act	Covered

AIUC-1 is comprehensive, auditable, technically grounded, and updated quarterly. It is shaped quarter by quarter through the AIUC-1 Consortium, which unites CISOs, GRC leaders, practitioners, and academics from leading organizations around the world. When a client asks who decided any of this, that page is the answer.The standard covers six principles, each broken into the sub-risks the evaluations target.

Principle	Sub-risks
Data & privacy	IP infringement, personal data leakage, business data leakage
Security	System information disclosure, unauthorized actions, insecure outputs, insecure actions
Safety	Physical harm, emotional harm, inappropriate content, high-risk domain engagement, vulnerable user engagement
Reliability	Service disruption, hallucination, incorrect tool calls
Accountability	Transparency
Society	Cyber

Three things certification surfaced for companies that have already been through it:

A customer service agent company saw its hallucination rate drop from 11% to <2% by strengthening its groundedness filter
A customer support agent company saw inappropriate tone and output format outputs reduce from 9% to <2% by strengthening defensive prompting and configuring output moderation
A product onboarding agent company discovered and patched a PII exposure vulnerability during the certification process

When the client says they already have ISO 42001. Agree with them, then show the overlap. AIUC-1 incorporates the majority of ISO 42001 controls, so their certificate is an accelerant rather than a competing spend.

Principle	Where ISO 42001 already covers it	What AIUC-1 adds
Data & privacy	Annex A.7 data management, A.4.3-4.5 resource documentation	Specificity on data preparation methods
Security	Clauses 8.1-8.3 operational planning, A.6.2.4 verification and validation	Pre-deployment testing and third-party adversarial robustness assessment
Safety	Clauses 6.1-6.3 and 8.2-8.4 risk assessment and treatment, A.5 impact assessment	Risk taxonomy and monitoring
Reliability	A.6.2.4 verification and validation	Hallucination and tool-call testing via third-party evaluation
Accountability	Clauses 4-10 management system, A.6.2.6-2.8 documentation and logging, A.8.4-8.5 incident communication	The deepest overlap of the six
Society	A.5.5 societal impact assessment	Scoped to cyber and catastrophic misuse prevention

Screening questions to ask before pricing

A yes to all of these means the agent is inside the box: certification proceeds on standard pricing and the standard timeline. Anything else is still certifiable, it just costs more time.

Question	Effect on scope
Is the agent text-first, covering inputs, outputs, and tool calls?	Text and input documents are standard. Generating output documents adds eval complexity. Voice, video, and image expand the applicable controls and require additional eval harnesses
Can the agent be accessed via API, from external infrastructure, with a persistent API key and clear documentation?	Determines eval volume and timeline. UI-only or locked-down environments are still certifiable, but slower
Is there a production or equivalent test environment the client can configure and seed with synthetic data?	Evals must be representative of real usage
What are the highest rate and concurrency limits to the model providers and the agent?	Higher limits allow greater volume and more complex evals in a shorter window
Can the client’s team collect evidence independently, with engineering support and a scope approver?	AIUC publishes typical evidence descriptions for every control, so clients can collect evidence themselves

Full ISO 42001 mapping

Send this when the client wants clause-level detail. Live.

Technical scoping form

Send this to the client’s technical owner before the scoping session. Live.

Request a gap assessment

The job: turn interest into a scoped opportunity.An outside-in gap assessment scores a company against the AIUC-1 requirements using only evidence the company has published, plus anything handed over directly. It separates requirements that already have public evidence from those plausibly covered but unproven, and from those that still need to be verified.The output earns its keep three ways. It gives the client a concrete reason for the next meeting, it names the gaps that justify the engagement, and it shows the delivery lift before anything is priced.

Gap assessment request form

Coming soon

Scope and price

The job: get sign off on scope, timeline, and cost. Then book a delivery slot.Agree the dates first. Agree what happens, when, what they receive, and who owns it. That’s what a client needs before they can approve a number. Kickoff to certificate takes about ten weeks.

Phase	Timing	What happens	Deliverable	Owner
Pre-work	Now	Confirm certification scope, and map AIUC-1 to what the client knows today	Scope and readiness assessment	Client
Audit readiness	Weeks 1-2	Close gaps on requirements marked to be verified, and set up sandbox access	Controls implemented: an audit-ready agent and infrastructure	AIUC
Eval and evidence collection	Weeks 3-7	White-box control testing and black-box adversarial testing	Eval results, every finding graded by severity	Auditor and AIUC
Results review	Weeks 7-8	Review deliverables and the evals dashboard, then Q&A on findings	Remediation plan covering what to fix and what can wait	Client, auditor, and AIUC
Certification	Week 9 onward	Audit report issued, quarterly re-testing begins	AIUC-1 certification	AIUC

One round of evals. A second round runs only if P0 or P1 findings are still open after remediation, and adds roughly three weeks.Then price it. One proposal, scoped and priced separately: the agent in scope, the certification fee, and the audit fee.Then book. Delivery capacity is reserved once the client signs. Booking the audit and certification is what moves the engagement to Deliver and certify.

The client proposal

Coming soon

Book a certification slot

Coming soon

Client-facing assets sit in the Client kit.

Introduction

Context

Standard

Certification

Auditors

Legal

Introduce and scope AIUC-1

Full ISO 42001 mapping

Technical scoping form

Gap assessment request form

The client proposal

Book a certification slot