Decision Assurance Infrastructure
Summit Cognitive
§ Solutions — ISO/IEC 42001

A management system runs on records.

ISO/IEC 42001 defines the AI Management System — the AIMS — the way ISO 27001 defined the ISMS: policies, risk treatment, operational controls, and the audit that checks whether any of it actually happens. Every management-system audit turns on the same question: where are the records that prove the controls operated? For AI decisions, that record is the receipt.

§ 01

The mandate, in plain language

42001 asks organizations to manage AI deliberately across its lifecycle. Three of its demands fall directly on decision infrastructure.

Demand 1

Operational control

The AIMS must control how AI systems operate in practice — not just how they were approved. Controls that exist only at design review leave the operating period unevidenced.
Demand 2

Documented information

Management systems live and die on records: evidence that processes ran, criteria were applied, and exceptions were handled. Auditors sample records; absent records read as absent controls.
Demand 3

Continual improvement

Nonconformities must be found, analyzed, and corrected. You cannot analyze an AI decision failure you cannot reproduce.
§ 02

What Summit produces for your AIMS

Plainly: ISO certification belongs to your organization and its auditors — Summit does not confer it. What Summit provides is the operational record-keeping layer that makes the decision-facing clauses of your AIMS auditable.

Mechanism

Receipts as documented information→

Every AI decision generates a signed record at the moment it happens: evidence considered, policy results, actor identity, verdict. Record-keeping as a property of the system, with integrity your auditor can verify independently.
Mechanism

Controls that evidence themselves→

Default-deny policy enforcement produces a record of every grant and denial. When the audit samples your operational controls, the sample is a receipt query — not an interview.
Mechanism

Replay for nonconformity analysis→

Deterministic replay reproduces any decision from its recorded inputs, so corrective action starts from the actual failure rather than a best guess at it.
Framework

A maturity vocabulary→

The open Cognitive Security Framework defines assurance levels CAL-1 through CAL-7 — a concrete ladder your AIMS objectives can target and your internal audits can measure against.
§ 03

How to start

Whether you are building toward initial certification or feeding an existing AIMS, the entry point is the same: one AI-assisted process in scope.

  1. 01
    Pick a process from your AIMS scope
    Ideally one your statement of applicability already commits to controlling — the place a stage-one audit will look first.
  2. 02
    Instrument it for ten days
    Receipts for every decision, policy gates live, replay verified. The records begin accumulating immediately.
  3. 03
    Review against the clauses
    A governance findings memo plus a receipt corpus — operational evidence your internal audit and management review can consume directly.

Give your AIMS an operating record.

The 10-Day Decision Assurance Pilot instruments one in-scope process and delivers the decision records — signed, replayable, sampleable — that a management-system audit is built to consume.

Start a PilotEU AI Act mapping