I recently attended one of the many ‘AI Summits’ aimed at developers, entrepreneurs, technology founders and investors in the AI space. In discussions about the future of AI, international standards (ISO, IEC, CEN-CENELEC, IEEE, ITU-T, ETSI) should be natural reference points. However they were noticeable by their absence, even in a talk from a lawyer focussed on AI regulation compliance.
Why are standards for AI development ignored? As I looked around the room at that summit, and later spoke to a recent tech graduate the answers began to dawn on me. The two generations deeply involved in building digital products – Gen X, now in senior leadership roles, and Gen Z, beginning their careers as fast-moving developers and founders, often treat standards as peripheral, outdated, or irrelevant. Understanding why requires looking beyond “lack of awareness” to a wider interplay of incentives, culture, and misconceptions.
Standards are perceived as belonging to a different era
Gen X: Legacy baggage
Many Gen X leaders built their careers in the 1990s and early 2000s when:
- Standards were associated with slow, committee-driven telecoms or hardware industries.
- The web revolution moved dramatically faster than standards bodies could react.
- Agile methodologies, open-source practices, and rapid iteration displaced formal documentation and compliance cultures.
For them, “standards” evoke the pre-internet industrial era, something that slows innovation rather than enabling it.
Gen Z: Seen as ‘their parents’ tools’
Gen Z grew up in a world where:
- Platforms and frameworks abstract away complexity.
- Tech culture celebrates disruption, not harmonisation.
- Standards are invisible in daily digital life (e.g., HTTP, Wi-Fi, Unicode), so their value is unnoticed.
To Gen Z, standards appear to be bureaucratic artefacts from older generations, not tools for building cutting-edge AI systems.
Social media creates a silence around standards
Tech discourse on social platforms (LinkedIn, X/Twitter, TikTok, Reddit) rarely includes:
- ISO/IEC 42001
- NIST AI RMF
- CEN-CENELEC JTC21 workstreams
- IEEE P7000-series
- EU AI Act harmonised standards
Instead, it amplifies:
- Frameworks (“Use LangChain!”)
- Models (“Here’s how to fine-tune Llama!”)
- Hot takes (“Regulation kills innovation!”)
Because standards rarely appear in feeds, algorithms treat them as low-engagement content. Silence becomes a signal: if it’s not discussed, it must not matter. For Gen Z, whose professional learning is heavily shaped by TikTok, YouTube, Discord and X, this omission creates a cultural blind spot.
Start-up incentives punish long-term thinking
Developers and founders, especially younger ones, optimise for:
- speed to MVP
- investor traction
- being first to market
- rapid scaling rather than durable reliability
International standards, however, optimise for:
- interoperability
- safety
- risk management
- documentation
- governance frameworks
- long-term robustness
The incentives are mismatched. From their viewpoint, standards are something you consider after success, not before.
The generational skill-stack has shifted
Gen X technologists
Often strong in:
- systems thinking
- networking
- data infrastructure
- security models
But weaker in:
- AI lifecycle governance
- responsible AI frameworks
- data assurance standards
Their skill stack predates modern AI governance, so the standards landscape feels unfamiliar or peripheral.
Gen Z technologists
Strong in:
- rapid prototyping
- no/low-code tools
- LLM integration
- cloud-native development
But typically underexposed to:
- formal methods
- verification and validation
- industry quality systems (ISO 9001/42001, IEC 61508, etc.)
To them, standards feel like dry paperwork, not engineering.
AI feels too new for standards
A widespread belief, shared by both generations, is that AI is evolving so quickly that:
- “Standards will always be out of date.”
- “Real innovation happens faster than committees.”
- “You can’t standardise something still in flux.”
This ignores the reality that:
- Standards increasingly focus on processes (governance, risk, lifecycle), not fixed technologies.
- Bodies such as ISO/IEC SC42 have been producing AI standards since 2017.
- Regulation (particularly EU AI Act and China’s AI regulation) makes standards operationally essential.
But the belief persists, fuelled by Silicon Valley rhetoric and media narratives.
Open-source culture replaces formal standards in developers’ minds
For many developers:
- GitHub repos
- best-practice wikis
- frameworks and APIs
- model cards
- open-source licences
feel like “standards,” even though they are not internationally harmonised or recognised in regulations. This “soft standardisation” environment makes formal standards seem redundant, until they become mandatory.
Lack of visibility inside education and bootcamps
Computer science degrees and coding bootcamps rarely:
- teach standards development processes
- reference ISO/IEC or IEEE documents
- explain how standards shape regulatory compliance
- show how to operationalise AI governance frameworks
As a result, both Gen X (who studied before AI governance existed) and Gen Z (whose programmes focus on skills, not compliance) enter the workforce illiterate regarding international standards.
Standards bodies have a branding problem
This is a big problem, so let’s be honest: ISO, IEC, IEEE and others often appear:
- slow
- opaque
- formal
- expensive to access
- full of jargon
- disconnected from mainstream developer culture
Younger developers prefer:
- open communities
- transparent discussion
- free materials
- quick iteration
Standards do not market themselves as developer-friendly, so developers self-select away.
The AI hype-cycle encourages “move fast, fix later”
With AI racing ahead:
- existential narratives (“AGI is near!”)
- gold rush mentality
- viral demos
- product-first thinking
There’s little patience for the methodical approach embedded in standards. This cultural environment marginalises anything seen as slowing down the AI boom, even when standards actually enable safe and scalable adoption.
Summary
Gen X and Gen Z developers and entrepreneurs aren’t intrinsically hostile to standards, they are products of technological cultures where standards are invisible, undervalued, and appear to be misaligned with immediate incentives.
Standards seem:
- too slow for today’s pace
- too formal for modern workflows
- too disconnected from social-media-driven tech knowledge
- too “old generation”
- too distant from practical, product-building realities
Yet as AI regulation tightens globally, these perceptions are becoming liabilities.
In my next post I’ll offer some radical ideas to help address this problem.
Disclosure for Transparency: This post was created with the help of ChatGPT 5.1. The ideas and key messages are those of the author; ChatGPT helped with the formatting and some of the detail.
Copyright © Rob Wortham, 2025