Is Artificial Intelligence Ready for Standardization

Many standards development organizations worldwide work on norms for Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and AI related processes. At the same time, many governments and companies massively invest in research on AI. It may be asked if AI research has already produced mature technologies and if this field is ready for standardization. This article looks at today’s situation of AI in the context of needs for standardization. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) runs a standardization project on AI since 2018. We give an up-to-date overview of the status of this work. While a fully comprehensive survey is not the objective, we describe a number of important aspects of the standardization work in AI. In addition, concrete examples for possible items of AI standards are described and discussed. From a scientific point of view, there are many open research questions that make AI standardization appear to be premature. However, our analysis shows that there is a sound basis for starting to work on AI standardization as being undertaken by ISO and other organizations.