ISO/IEC 42001:2023·Annex A A.4.6·medium·Component: Organizational controls

What this control requires

Competent personnel with defined responsibilities shall be assigned to AI-related activities and supported with training and oversight.
— ISO/IEC 42001:2023, Annex A A.4.6

In plain English

Competent personnel with defined responsibilities shall be assigned to AI-related activities and supported with training and oversight. In practice, this means you can prove you define resources-level controls on a defined cadence.

Why it matters

ISO 42001 is the first audited evidence regulators, customers and investors can ask for that you are managing AI risk. Each Annex A control is a check-box in that audit; it is also the management system enterprises are starting to require from AI vendors before an MSA can be signed.

What an auditor looks for

An ISO 42001 auditor verifies you have an AI policy, a risk-based system of impact assessments for each AI system, lifecycle controls from data acquisition through retirement, and third-party-AI controls that pierce the vendor's wrapper to underlying model behaviour.

Within Organizational controls, the assessor will trace your implementation back to the catalogue reference (Annex A A.4.6) and look for objective evidence on the latest two assessment cycles.

How to implement

  1. Write a short policy stating intent, scope and named owner.
  2. Encode it as a platform guardrail — SCP, Azure Policy initiative, Organisation Policy, or repository policy.
  3. Wire a monitoring signal that catches drift (CSPM rule, SIEM rule, scheduled query, Workspace alert) and ticket it.
  4. Review on a documented cadence and capture the review in the risk register or compliance tracker.

Operational checklist

  • Define. Document the trigger, the owner and the cadence.
  • Scope: resources.

Evidence to collect

  • Policy Document. A signed and version-controlled policy / standard / procedure document.
  • Identity Scan. IAM / IdP exports — Entra ID, Okta, IAM Identity Center, Workspace directory — showing accounts, roles, MFA state and last sign-in.

Policies, organizational records, and identity evidence should demonstrate that competent personnel are assigned to AI-related activities with defined responsibilities, access boundaries, and oversight. Focus: Human resources.

How it maps to other frameworks

Computed from shared tags, control component and key-operation subjects — handy when you are reconciling controls across an audit.

Related controls in ISO/IEC 42001:2023

References

Topics: governance riskidentity accesstraining awarenessidentity managementtraining management