In a world where everyone feels compelled to put AI on the first slide, Patrice Canonne opened his recent webinar with a wink, and then got very real, very fast: standards are changing, and the organizations behind them need to modernize how standards are authored, structured, and delivered if they want to stay relevant (and useful).
“The world is changing. It’s changing fast.”
Patrice’s core argument is practical: AI won’t save messy content. If standards remain locked in siloed Word files and PDF documents, AI initiatives will produce fragile results, because the content lacks consistent structure, reusable meaning, and an explicit model of context.
“It’s not about documents anymore… but it’s not even about structures anymore.”
The problem: inflation without actionability
To make the challenge tangible, Patrice used a humorous “global committee for successful parenthood” and a deceptively simple requirement: “Kids shall clean their bedrooms.” The joke lands because it mirrors a real problem in standards: committees add clarification, annexes, cross-references, and objectives until content becomes overloaded: readable, but hard to apply.
“A requirement is never that simple… there is a context which is very important.”
This leads to what Patrice calls “the era of super specialization and content inflation”, where standards grow, but usability doesn’t.
The unlock: semantic and ontology-driven authoring
Patrice proposes a shift toward semantic authoring and ontologically correct semantic authoring: not just structuring content, but explicitly modelling entities (actors, actions, items), their relationships, and the “why” behind requirements.
“It’s always about that triplet… what the requirement is, but more importantly why… and then the how.”
This isn’t theory for theory’s sake. Patrice links it to outcomes standards bodies care about: better reuse, smarter alignment across committees, improved discoverability, and content that can support machine-readable delivery and API-first consumption.
Practical guidance for SDOs
The webinar also delivers grounded implementation advice: Don’t try to solve everything at once. Start with the areas that hurt most, and iterate.
“You don’t have to tackle the whole problem at once.”
Collaboration needs shared platforms, not midnight email chains and disconnected drafts.
“We can now provide single shared platforms… everybody is accessing the same pool of data and content.”
AI is an outcome, not a starting point.
“Don’t think AI is going to solve the problem… you’re going to have to tackle… the content creation stream.”
Watch the full webinar
This blog only captures the highlights. The full session includes the full “parenthood standard” analogy, a clear explanation of why knowledge graphs and ontologies can “take your LLM to school,” and a pragmatic discussion of tooling choices.
If your standards organization is thinking about modernization, discoverability, or AI-readiness, the recording is well worth your time.
Customer Success Manager at Fonto – Passionate runner and Dad