With generative AI adoption moving faster than the personal computer or the internet and global AI-related investment in 2025 representing $581.69 billion, organizations must position their workforce to use AI to power their operations while employing it responsibly. Researchers affiliated with the AI Adoption Initiative argue that the workforce relates to AI through an AI Labor Stack comprised of AI innovators, facilitators, and users, and that facilitators are often “the missing middle” in national AI strategies though they are responsible for “translat[ing] AI capability into practical deployment across firms, sectors, and public services.” (Ferrone et al., 2026).

We support this facilitator population in instituting or improving systematic approaches to AI governance within their organization through review of the international standard ISO/IEC 42005:2025, exploring its guidance on how to efficiently integrate AI impact assessments into their broader governance ecosystem.

Standards-based governance frameworks offer a practical path forward — and AWS has invested in making them actionable. At Amazon we have been proponents of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards development projects for AI risk management, both as certifications we have achieved for multiple AI services (Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q Business, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Textract), and as something we advocate for our customers to use for certifying their own services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers tools to support governance work aligned with ISO/IEC 42005 and other responsible AI best practices, including our ISO/IEC 42001:2023 AI Management Systems (AIMS) implementation guide on AWS and our Well-Architected Framework: Responsible AI Lens that can assist customers in using this standard in their enterprise risk management ecosystems. In this post we explore the AI system impact assessment: what it is, how it improves enterprise-wide risk management, and how ISO/IEC 42005 codifies AI system impact assessment best practices.