AI for standards: Smarter, faster standards review and requirements extraction

The real challenge isn’t cccess—It’s extraction

Getting access to a standard is easy. But extracting the right requirements accurately, defensibly, and under time pressure is the hard part.

That’s where Viewer’s embedded AI comes in. It doesn’t replace expertise, it amplifies it. AI in Viewer acts as your productivity layer: speeding up clause navigation, simplifying extraction, and ensuring every insight is traceable back to the source. You stay in control, with explainability, governance, and security built in from the start.

AI designed for working with standards

 Generic AI struggles with the language, structure, and precision required for standards. Viewer’s AI is purpose-built for this work. It understands how standards are organized normative vs. informative content, terms and definitions, references, and summaries and treats each as a first-class task.

Every answer includes exact clause citations so users can verify insights quickly. It supports multilingual work, auto-detects language, and offers context-preserving translations at the end of each interaction.

The challenge: complexity, time pressure, compliance risk

Standards exist to reduce uncertainty, yet working with them is inherently demanding. Documents are dense, interconnected, and written in highly specialized language. Review cycles continue to shrink while the volume of standards and revisions increases. At the same time, the cost of misinterpretation is high: overlooking a requirement or misunderstanding a definition can lead to audit findings, rework, or delayed product launches.

The AI layer in the Viewer addresses these realities by compressing time to insight and reducing the likelihood of oversight, while deliberately preserving expert judgment.

How AI works in the Viewer

At the core of the Viewer is an AI assistant embedded directly into the standards review experience (currently in BETA). Users can ask natural-language questions about the standard they are viewing and get clear, traceable answers.

Each request is analyzed to understand the user’s intent such as summarization, requirement extraction, definitions, or analysis and routed to specialized AI components designed for that task. Requirements-related questions receive additional rigor to ensure accuracy and defensibility.

The assistant returns structured answers with explicit references to the relevant clauses and sections, translating responses as needed, and suggesting follow-up questions to support an efficient, end-to-end review.

Quick facts: Viewer AI highlights

• Embedded AI assistant for standards review (BETA)

• Natural-language questions directly against the standard

• Intent-aware processing (summary, requirements, definitions, analysis)

• Dedicated rigor for requirements extraction

• Clause-level traceability for every answer

• Multilingual support with automatic translation

• Expert-in-the-loop by design — you stay in control

• Follow-up prompts to accelerate review workflows

What it does

The AI layer turns standards into an interactive workspace. Users ask questions in natural language and get fast, reliable answers grounded in the exact clauses they’re reviewing, cutting time spent searching and cross-referencing.

With one click, teams can generate full or scoped summaries, extract complete or targeted requirements, align terms and definitions, and surface normative references with clear context. Every result is traceable and defensible, while smart follow-up prompts keep reviews moving faster and with greater confidence.

Trust & governance: explainability over automation

Trust is essential in standards work, which is why explainability comes before automation. Every AI-generated answer is fully traceable to the original clauses or sections, and the system is deliberately limited to the content the user is reviewing—never uncontrolled external sources.

Built on Azure AI Foundry, the solution meets enterprise security and governance expectations and follows established internal AI usage guidelines. Designed with a human-in-the-loop approach, the AI supports discovery and synthesis, while final interpretation and decisions remain with the expert. When evidence is insufficient, the system is explicit about its limits and will not speculate.

Who benefits — and how

• Standards users & compliance teams: Faster clause discovery, fewer missed requirements, and stronger audit trails.

• Product & engineering teams: Quicker insight into how standards change affect design and implementation.

• Quality & risk functions: Reduced likelihood of oversight through systematic extraction and traceability.

• New team members: Faster onboarding through clear summaries and consolidated definitions.

Use cases

During compliance scoping, users can ask targeted questions such as which requirements apply to a specific topic, and receive a scoped, clause‑linked requirements set. For change impact analysis, the AI can summarize what has changed in a particular section between editions, with direct references to the affected clauses. In supplier alignment work, teams can extract normative references and see exactly where and why they are invoked. For onboarding and training, users can generate concise summaries of key chapters and definitions. During audit preparation, the system can support the creation of verifiable checklists that link each requirement back to the source standard.

Want to see it in action? Get in touch with our team to learn more.