Chris Cantrell, senior managing director, standards and engineering services, at ASME, explains how standards can help companies get ahead, innovate, and access a broader market base. For more on the subject, look for Chris’s column: The X Factor: Why Companies that Invest in Standardization Can Realize Their Growth Goals.

Michelle: Can you tell us why is standardization important?

Chris: Standardization is important for a lot of reasons. One of the main ones is to help protect public health and safety. And also standards does promote and drive technical innovation. Having a level playing field among all market participants is what standardization promotes and allows and gives everyone that are manufacturing a product or implementing a process that baseline of understanding between all of those that it's very, that everyone's playing to the same rule book. It also does provide a lot of efficiencies for governments, regulators and purchasers of those products and services because they know that on that certain baseline, what they're going to be getting has gone through a process, is built to a recognized standard. And so it really allows people to understand the types of products we're getting and the quality level and safety level associated with that. Definitely, very important. So today, can you tell us, are there any trends you've seen in this area, things people are talking about more? Yeah, of course, artificial intelligence is huge right now. It's been- I've heard of it. But it's been almost two years since ChatGP came onto the scene. And so a lot of standards developing organizations, ASME included, are trying to grapple with the positive and negative impacts of artificial intelligence. We've also seen a real drive towards sustainability technologies and sustainability standards, those related to hydrogen small modular reactors and many other technologies that are helping drive towards the UN's sustainable development goals and that net zero target that most industry has been focused on. I do need to caution though, one of the trends I've also seen is there's been an increase towards developing regional standards or certain countries or jurisdictions or markets acting in kind of a protectionist way. And that really does introduce market confusion, right? Standardization, as we talked about before, one of the real benefits of standardization is that it allows a product that's been built and sometimes even certified to a standard to be recognized in multiple markets, right? To meet one and be recognized in multiple markets. So when the market begins to, or individual geographical markets or regional markets begin to develop their own specialized standards or certifications, it does really make it much more complex for businesses and other stakeholders to really know what's going on in those. So I just caution against that regional development of codes and standards and that market specific or protectionist kind of work going on.

We've also seen too that mentioning standards without mentioning certification kind of does a disservice, right? Because we can all say that we build or design or develop a process that meets a certain standard. But that certification process is really important because it does give those markets, the purchasers, that extra sense of certainty that not only does the product self-declaring that they meet a certain standard, but it also has an independent third party verification that the product or process has met a standard by having that certification.

[It] has been doing certification since the early 1900s with our boiler and pressure vessel series of standards. But there are several that goes out there that also have their own certifications. And that just is a testament, independently verified testament that a product, service process meets the full intent of those referencing standards.

Michelle: I guess we sort of touched on it, which what was new with standards, but is there anything you've seen certain areas that are growing within the standards field or anything along those lines?

Chris: So artificial intelligence. [It has] really great capacity to process loads of information in a short amount of time. And a lot of standards developing organization need those loads of information. But what we have to understand is that standardization or not standardization, artificial intelligence really is still in the toddler stage, right? It's going out there. It's grabbing any information that it can.

Right. It's grabbing any information it can, and it's trying to interpret those and provide answers to people, sometimes in a really great way, a really amazing way, but also sometimes in a way that either has bias in it, or there's a little bit of falseness or going out and grabbing information that it doesn't have permission to. So that's something that standardization organizations and really most businesses are trying to pay attention to is how do we keep our AI, or how do we use AI to be as responsive and agile as we can, but without damaging the product or the validity of the products that we're building, the standards that we're building. You know, AI is great technology. I think we need AI and its generative capacity to help us respond to these emerging technologies in a more rapid way. But I think as SDOs, especially SDOs, look at these, at this time, look at using this technology. We need to understand some of those variabilities because speed to market is one thing, but quality, of course we're talking with the quality magazine here, the quality and the safety and veracity of the information that we're using really does need to be vetted right now. So we're all really excited about artificial intelligence, but we have to have that cautionary mindset when we use it. And just to make sure that, you know, we do, we are still protecting the public and providing that level even playing field for all participants. Yeah, that makes sense. I like the toddler analogy, like exciting, new, interesting, but kind of put up some boundaries and guardrails with the process.