Competence: Your Team Can't Govern What It Doesn't Understand

Here is a hard truth: you cannot govern what you do not understand.

ISO 42001 requires competence. The people who build, buy, deploy, and oversee your AI systems need the knowledge and skills to do it responsibly. Not PhDs in machine learning. Enough understanding to ask the right questions and spot the wrong answers.

In plain English, this is AI literacy with accountability attached. Your marketing lead using an AI copywriter should understand what the tool does with customer data. Your HR team using resume screening should understand bias risk. Your executives signing off on AI strategy should understand what they are signing.

I love teaching, so let me say this as a teacher: competence is built, not hired. You build it with training that respects people's intelligence, repeated regularly, tied to their actual work. A once-a-year slide deck does not build competence. Ongoing, practical learning does.

Start with a simple question for each role that touches AI: what does this person need to understand to do their part safely? Then teach exactly that. No more, no less.

An AI management system run by people who do not understand AI is theater. Train the cast.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.