Accreditation and Innovation (Part 1 of 3)
World Accreditation Day 2026 is observed on June 9, and this year’s theme is “Innovation, Trust and Sustainability: The Power of Accreditation.” The theme puts three ideas at the center of a conversation that matters far beyond the conformity assessment community. In this three-part blog series, ANAB looks at how accreditation connects to all three ideas, starting with innovation.
Accreditation and conformity assessment are often invisible to the public. Most people never think about the testing, inspection, certification, validation, and verification that sit behind the products they use, the systems they rely on, and the claims organizations make. But that infrastructure is what allows innovation to scale, markets to function, and trust to exist between organizations, regulators, and consumers. Without it, even the most promising technologies can struggle to move from possibility to practice.
Why Innovation Needs Accreditation
Innovation only succeeds when people trust a new product, technology, or process. That trust doesn’t develop on its own. Conformity assessment bodies such as laboratories, inspection bodies, certification bodies, validation and verification bodies provide the independent assurance that regulators, buyers, and consumers need before they’ll commit to relying on something new. Accreditation confirms those bodies are competent, impartial, and operate to recognized standards. It supports innovation not by slowing it down, but by giving it a credible path to adoption.
AI and Conformity Assessment: A Sector in Transition
Nowhere is the impact of conformity assessment more visible right now than in artificial intelligence. A recent survey from the AIQI Consortium found that 36% of conformity assessment bodies are currently using or actively developing AI, but only 16% of those are applying it to core conformity assessment activities like auditing, inspection, or certification decisions. Organizations that operate under accreditation are accustomed to working within defined requirements, and when those requirements don’t yet address a rapidly evolving area, uncertainty tends to produce caution rather than experimentation. Using AI in a certification decision is a fundamentally different proposition than using it to draft a newsletter, and the standards landscape around AI in conformity assessment is still developing.
ANAB is navigating this directly. ANAB has established a policy position on how assessors may use AI tools during accreditation assessments, launched assessor training on AI for information systems and formed an internal AI task force to identify where AI can be responsibly applied across our operations.
Accreditation Across Emerging Industries
In cybersecurity, ANAB has partnered with The Cyber AB to execute accreditation assessment activities for CMMC Third-Party Assessment Organizations, with ANAB’s assessments supporting Cyber AB accreditation committee decisions. Organizations seeking CMMC certification need to know that the assessment body evaluating them is competent and impartial. In forensic science, courts and law enforcement agencies rely on accredited laboratories because the credibility of a result, whether digital evidence or laboratory analysis, has to be established independently before it means anything in a legal proceeding.
Accreditation also has to keep pace with the industries it serves. New sectors and emerging technologies don’t always fit neatly into existing frameworks. ANAB’s Quality Assurance Evaluation Program (QAEP) was built to address exactly that, giving scheme owners, benchmarking organizations, regulators, and corporate entities an independent evaluation of quality assurance programs that fall outside traditional accreditation. The output is a formal Letter of Attestation confirming that a program is doing what it says it’s doing.
ANAB Executive Director Doug Leonard says:
“Even as technology transforms conformity assessment, the people doing this work remain its most important asset. AI and automation can support processes, but the judgment, expertise, and accountability that make accreditation meaningful are human.”
Innovation needs proof. The technologies and processes that end up mattering are the ones that earned confidence along the way, not just attention. In the next blog post in this series, ANAB looks at how that confidence becomes trust and why trust is the foundation that global markets depend on.
