ASSIST Software Clears One of the World's Newest AI Audits, Earning ISO/IEC 42001 Certification

ASSIST Software, an AI and custom software development company based in Suceava, Romania, has become one of the first organizations in Europe to receive ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification, the international standard governing how companies build, manage, and remain accountable for AI systems in production.

ASSIST Software received its ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification in May 2026, following an audit conducted by CERTINSPECT, an accredited certification body. The certificate covers the full range of the company's technical operations: software and application development, IT network design, telecommunications, support services, and research and development in engineering and natural sciences. The ISO/IEC 42001 standard was published by the International Organization for Standardization in late 2023, and the field of certified organizations worldwide remains small. What ISO/IEC 42001 Requires and Why It Matters in Practice ISO/IEC 42001:2023 is the first international standard built specifically for Artificial Intelligence Management Systems. Where ISO 27001 governs information security and ISO 9001 governs quality, ISO/IEC 42001 addresses the characteristics that make AI harder to govern with existing frameworks: probabilistic outputs, data that shifts over time, and behavior that needs to be monitored long after deployment. To achieve certification, an organization must demonstrate an AI management system that is established, documented, actively maintained, and continually improved. In practice, that means defined oversight responsibilities, structured risk and impact assessments across the full AI lifecycle, transparency and traceability of AI outputs, third-party and data-supply oversight, and post-deployment monitoring with documented evidence. The standard is designed to operate alongside ISO 27001 and to support compliance work under the EU AI Act, without replacing the Act's own conformity obligations for high-risk systems. For ASSIST Software, the certification formalizes governance practices already embedded in long-standing strategic partnerships. AI and software work delivered for clients such as Dräger, BAT, and Trimble, across regulated and operationally critical environments, now sits under an internationally audited AI management framework. The same governance applies to the company's Horizon Europe R&D portfolio: LLM4CIP, coordinated by ASSIST Software, which applies large language models to critical infrastructure resilience; SECASSURED, where ASSIST Software contributes assurance-driven cybersecurity engineering for IoT–edge–cloud systems alongside SINTEF, NTNU, Fraunhofer FOKUS, and others; and