Valliance is now ISO 27001 certified

Certifying Trust in an Agentic World: Why Valliance Pursued ISO 27001

When AI systems execute decisions autonomously, governance becomes infrastructure

Compliance is such a great topic. OK, maybe not really. But when coupled with AI, I’m certainly more interested. The distinction between AI-assisted and AI-autonomous systems is not semantic. It is operational, legal, and increasingly existential for the enterprises deploying them.

AI-assisted tools augment human work. A developer uses a coding copilot, but the developer remains accountable for what ships. At least for now. The security posture is familiar: protect the credentials, review the output, maintain the audit trail.

AI-autonomous systems work differently. An agent interprets context, makes decisions, and executes actions. The human is not in the loop for each decision. They designed the system, set the constraints, and delegated authority. When that agent operates inside a financial workflow, a clinical trial process, or a supply chain optimisation system, the accountability model inverts. The question shifts from "did the developer write secure code?" to "does the organisation that built this agent operate to a standard that justifies the trust placed in it?"

Valliance builds agentic systems for enterprises where that question has regulatory and reputational weight. We pursued ISO 27001 certification because the work required it. To view the certification, please visit Valliance’s Trust Centre

The Trust Deficit in AI Consulting

The AI consultancy market expanded rapidly through 2024 and 2025. Capability claims are abundant. Governance maturity is not.

Enterprise buyers, particularly in regulated sectors, face a selection problem. Every consultancy promises transformation. Few can demonstrate that their own operations meet the compliance thresholds their clients are required to maintain. A bank cannot engage a vendor whose security practices would fail the bank's own supplier due diligence. An insurer cannot deploy agentic systems built by a consultancy that lacks auditable controls over its own information assets.

The result is a split. Consultancies that can evidence governance maturity can legitimately deliver consequential work: sensitive data, critical processes, strategic implementations. Those that cannot are confined to proofs of concept and sandboxed experiments that never reach production.

ISO 27001 certification is one mechanism, and an internationally recognised one, for resolving this mismatch.

Why ISO 27001 for an AI Consultancy

We did not pursue certification because a regulator mandated it. No client issued an ultimatum. We certified because the nature of agentic AI work makes governance something that is absolutely needed to establish trust.

Multi-agent architectures cross trust boundaries. The systems we build for clients involve agents that access, process, and act upon data from multiple sources. Without rigorous access controls and data handling protocols within our own organisation, we cannot credibly design systems that enforce those controls for others.

Agentic systems require auditable decision chains. When an autonomous agent executes a consequential action, the enterprise must be able to reconstruct why. That auditability begins with the consultancy that built the system. If our own development, deployment, and change management processes lack traceability, the systems we deliver inherit that deficit.

Trust as the Scarce Resource

Let’s be frank, capability in AI is commoditising. Every consultancy has access to the same foundation models. The same APIs. The same frameworks. The barrier to building something that demos well has collapsed.

The differentiation is not in what you can build. It is in whether you can be trusted to build it responsibly.

Trust is the scarce resource now. And trust has a specific property that capability does not: it cannot be claimed. “Honest, guv, you can trust me”. No. It must be evidenced.

A consultancy can claim expertise in agentic architectures. They can show case studies and reference clients. But when an enterprise is deciding whether to let that consultancy build autonomous systems that will operate inside their production environment, with their customer data, making decisions that carry regulatory and reputational consequences, claims are insufficient. The enterprise needs evidence that the consultancy operates with the discipline the work demands.

ISO 27001 certification provides that evidence. Not because the certificate itself is magic, but because the certification process forces an organisation to build and maintain the controls, documentation, and audit trails that constitute operational maturity. You cannot pass an ISO 27001 audit by assembling a compliance deck the week before. The auditors look at how you actually operate.

For Valliance, certification was the natural formalisation of practices we had largely established and experience we have all gained in the years that we’ve worked in and with large enterprises. We completed the process in six weeks because we already had a great foundation.

The result is a consultancy that can demonstrate, not just assert, that our information security management meets an internationally recognised standard. When we tell clients that we take governance seriously, we can point to independent verification.

The Broader Signal

The AI consultancy market will consolidate around governance maturity. Enterprises are not going to entrust agentic systems to vendors who cannot demonstrate disciplined management of their own information security. These are systems that make decisions and execute actions autonomously. The bar for trust is correspondingly high.

ISO 27001 certification is one credible signal of that maturity. It is not the only one. SOC 2, industry-specific certifications, and client-conducted audits all contribute to the picture. But ISO 27001's international recognition and comprehensive scope make it a useful baseline.

Valliance chose to certify proactively. Not in response to an incident. Not under client pressure. We did it because building autonomous systems for regulated enterprises requires operating to a standard that justifies the trust those enterprises place in us.

The certification is not an achievement to celebrate. It is operational infrastructure. The kind of infrastructure that agentic AI demands.

To view the ISO 27001 certification, please visit Valliance’s Trust Centre