TECH FOCUS: AI AND AUTOMATION Leveraging AI to digitize standards and technical documents More than just requirements: how many types of information are in this paragraph? storage parameters, and more. There are often not machinereadable patterns to clearly identify the different types of information in standards. Standards committees may need to start tagging how different types of information is classified in a document to ensure it's accurately interpreted by machine-based algorithms. LESSON 3: Standards may need more specificity Some information in standards is vague-and this is sometimes by design. SAE has also found that many specialized standards require some amount of " tribal knowledge " to know how to read and interpret them. In attempting to classify different types of information in standards, SAE found that machines often read standards differently from humans. The lack of specificity in many standards today have led to inaccurate representation of the 26 December 2024 information by AI algorithms. Many standards may need to be revised to provide more specificity as we look to leverage AI-based technologies to interpret and classify information. LESSON 4: Consistency matters SAE has spoken at many industry events about how to write more digital-ready standards. There are guidelines standards authors can use today that will help machine-based algorithms more accurately interpret standards in the future. Consistency is the common theme to many of these guidelines: consistency in terminology, sentence structure, how data is represented in tables, how data ranges are documented, and more. These guidelines will need to be enforced as future standards are written to make AI more successful in accurately interpreting standards. LESSON 5: Think ahead about classification There are a lot of companies offering AI services to digitize the mountains of paper your organization may need to reference. Some of these companies may offer to digitize hundreds or thousands of your standards in a short period of time (for a lot of money). However, SAE has learned that this approach will just create a mountain of technical debt to replace your mountain of paper. Think ahead about what information you need from different types of standards and how you want to use UPDATE SAE International