The four governance lanes — how readiness becomes a public certificate.
AIIX-SPEC 5.5.1 replaces one-size assessment with four lanes, three public claim states, and a certificate that stays honest between audits. Here is the model — and how to choose your lane.
One assessment never fitted every organisation.
A nine-person startup and a national bank do not need the same appraisal — but they do need the same honesty. AIIX-SPEC 5.5.1 resolves this with four governance lanes: the depth of assessment scales to the organisation and the public claim it wants to make, while the caps, floors and evidence rules never bend.
Every lane draws on the same 14 domains, 42 sub-dimensions, 71 evidence templates and 47 certification conditions. What changes is instrument depth, independent appraisal, and what you may say in public.
The four lanes.
Three public claim states.
What an organisation may publicly claim is a normative state, not a marketing choice:
Live certificate status moves through Green · Watch · At-Risk · Suspended · Withdrawn as the evidence does — verifiable at binnovy.com/aiix/verify.
The 90-day conditional path.
A high average never certifies alone, but a bounded, named gap need not block an otherwise-ready organisation. Obstacles sort into three classes:
A condition overdue moves the certificate At-Risk; unresolved 30 days later, Suspended. Anything not in the exhaustive Class-C catalogue is Class B — D9, the assurance spine, is never conditionable.
Continuously verified — not annually audited.
Between appraisals the certificate stays honest through a lightweight heartbeat — quarterly for Foundation Public and Standard, monthly for Extended Assurance and Optimised — and a public verifier synced from the runtime, never edited by hand.
AI incidents are not a footnote. The incident register captures every violation with computed impact, risk and corrective actions; open high-severity incidents block a new claim, and every open item is carried into the next review until closure evidence is accepted. Miss the drill or leave a corrective action overdue, and the status moves before anyone files a complaint.