Last month, the global standards community marked World Standards Day on 14th October. This year's theme, "Shared vision for a better world: Spotlight on United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 – Affordable and Clean Energy". At a time when most multi-lateral organisations are working hard to stay relevant, international standardisation bodies are powering our lives and enabling innovation.
Importance of standards
If you see around us, standards are everywhere in our daily lives, but we rarely notice them. They are why a plug fits the socket, a bank card works in a cash machine abroad, a phone connects to any network, and a shipping container fits every port, ship and lorry. They give us common sizes, shared vocabularies and agreed ways of measuring quality. They are an integral part of our lives, making it safer and more innovative.
For safety-critical applications like the cars we drive, the aeroplanes we fly in, the ships we board, standards matter even more, because the cost of getting it wrong is measured in lives lost. All these transport domains rely on standards to set out how hazards are identified, how systems are tested and what evidence is needed before they can be trusted.
Autonomous vehicles are no different! To add to the challenge: the "driver" is software, often powered by AI, making decisions in an open and unpredictable environment. With no human to fall back on, standards become the shared yardstick against which developers, regulators and the public can judge whether a system is safe enough.
From hypercompetition to collaboration: The observation
The world of AI and autonomous vehicle technology is one of the most fiercely contested commercial technologies. Carmakers, tech giants and start-ups are racing for talent, investment and market share, while guarding their AI algorithms and data closely. Yet the same companies sit around the same tables at standardisation forums (like ISO) and regulatory forums (like United Nations’ UNECE), working together on the best practices and rules that will govern them all.
This is not a contradiction. Standards cover the pre-competitive ground: shared definitions, test methods and safety expectations that no single company can establish alone, and from which every company benefits.
As an academic in safety science, I have long argued that safety for any technology needs to be pre-competitive. A serious incident involving one developer's technology can potentially damage public trust in the whole technology, so safety is a shared interest rather than a point of difference. Companies should compete on the product, the experience and the business model, but they need to work together on the safety foundations, and that collaboration grows the market everyone is competing for.
A decade in standardisation: The learnings
I started my standardisation journey representing the UK at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2016. Having spent a decade in international standardisation and served as lead author for eight ISO standards for autonomous vehicles, for me standards serve three purposes: 1) they help drive industry state-of-the-art; 2) enable innovation and interoperability 3) help prevent the introduction of unsafe technology.
The balance between these three aspects remains key, as the world experiences a period of rapid technological progress, be it AI, autonomous driving, robotics, electric vehicles.
As a researcher, my biggest motivation lies in the ability to drive impact through translating strong research outputs into global standards. I remain grateful to the British Standards Institution (BSI), UK’s national standardisation body, for the support, the platform and the trainings along this journey.
Earlier this year, when BSI recognised my contribution with the BSI Impact Award 2026 for Leadership, it was both humbling and gratifying. It was a recognition of not just my own efforts, but the support and joint contributions of experts worldwide. I strongly believe that standardisation is a collaborative journey, and "strong standards need strong collaboration”.
From local research to a global standard: Collaboration at its core
Back in 2018, one of the most basic questions for any autonomous vehicle was (and continues to be) deceptively simple: under what conditions is it designed to operate? This is called its Operational Design Domain, or ODD: the road types, weather, lighting, traffic and other static and dynamic conditions within which the system is meant to function safely.
In the early days, every organisation described its ODD in its own way, and comparing two safety claims had no common yardstick. Through UK Government funded collaborative research projects with various industry partners, at WMG, University of Warwick, we built the concept for a common approach to specifying the ODD. Subsequently, I had the privilege of leading the translation the research output into a British standard (BSI PAS 1883).
What began as a UK document did not stay national for long. Through strong collaboration and a common mission of global experts, I was able to lead the translation of the British standard into an international standard (ISO 34503). This journey from national specification to international standard to implementation guidance not only shows how standardisation can turn a local insight into a shared global asset, but also how collaboration sits at the heart of both research as well as standardisation.
Standards, regulation and public trust
Standards and regulation are distinct but closely linked. Regulators rarely write detailed engineering methods themselves. They lean on technical experts to create the standards to translate high-level regulatory safety goals into something measurable.
Having represented the UK on both global standards and regulatory forums, I have always championed to ensure that UK rules remain aligned with those adopted internationally, and in many cases shape the international rules.
That alignment matters commercially. A vehicle developed for one market should not need to be re-engineered and re-evidenced from scratch for every other. Harmonised standards lower costs, shorten time to market and allow smaller developers to compete with established manufacturers.
They matter for the public too. As co-founder of PAVE UK (country’s first national initiative for raising public awareness and trust in selfdriving technology), I have long argued that automated vehicles will only succeed if people trust them. Transparent, independently developed standards give that trust a foundation: they show that safety claims are being measured against agreed benchmarks rather than a company's own marketing.
What’s next…
Standardisation is not a bureaucratic overhead, but the infrastructure on which a safe AI and autonomous vehicle industry is being built. As AI becomes more mainstream and proliferates into various aspects of our lives, assuring AI-based systems will be based on building a shared language, testing against shared evidence, and aligning nationally and globally. The trust they need will be built, standard by standard, by people working together.
To all my fellow standards makers, thank you for all the countless discussions and your efforts in progressing the industry forward. It takes a village to create impactful standards. At a personal level, I remain grateful for all the cooperation, constructive challenges, mentorships and the friendships.
Let’s continue to make our world more innovative, more collaborative and safer, through standards.
