Contributor programme
Your article format
The structure to write to. Follow it and your draft goes to the edit on substance alone — nobody spends a round arguing about shape, which is the round that improves nothing.
§ 1 — Length
Eight hundred to fifteen hundred words
The section counts below add up to that range. Fifteen hundred is a ceiling, not a target: if your point lands at nine hundred words, stop at nine hundred.
The full editorial standards — sourcing, the line on AI-assisted drafting, and what we will not run — are in the contributor guidelines. This page is only about shape.
§ 2 — Choosing one
Narrow beats important
The most common reason a draft does not work is not the writing. It is that the subject was chosen to be significant rather than to be yours. A title naming a whole field promises a survey, and a survey is the one thing we do not publish.
One test, and it is unforgiving: could anyone else have written this? If the answer is yes, narrow it until the answer is no — usually by adding the specific thing that happened, to you, with a number or a moment in it.
Not: “The Future of AI Governance”
Write: “We failed our first ISO/IEC 42001 gap assessment on one clause.”
Not: “Why AI Security Matters More Than Ever”
Write: “Our red team broke the agent through the retrieval layer, not the prompt.”
Examples, by theme
Illustrations only — none of these has been written or commissioned, and they are not a list to pick from. They are here to show the shape of a title that could only have come from the person writing it. The themes are on the guidelines page.
- AI assurance
- We ran one model through three evaluation suites and got three verdicts. What that says about “assured”.
- The evidence our auditor asked for that we did not have — and should have.
- AI security
- Our red team broke the agent through the retrieval layer, not the prompt.
- Six months of prompt-injection attempts against a production assistant: what actually worked.
- AI governance
- We failed our first ISO/IEC 42001 gap assessment on one clause. It was not the one we prepared for.
- The NIST AI RMF gave us a vocabulary, not a control set. Here is what we built to fill the gap.
- Agentic AI
- The week our agent held credentials it should never have had — and how we found out.
- Why we gate agent actions by reversibility rather than by risk score.
- AI in financial services
- What our supervisor actually asked about the credit model, and what we had ready.
- We treated the model as a third-party dependency under DORA. It changed the whole review.
- AI in legal practice
- I checked two hundred citations from an AI research tool. Eleven were wrong in a way that mattered.
- Our firm’s AI policy fits on one page. The two sentences took three months.
- AI regulation and policy
- We scoped ourselves as an EU AI Act deployer and were wrong.
- Reading a state AI act that was repealed and reenacted before it ever bound anybody.
- Certification and workforce
- We hired for AI assurance and met candidates who had never seen a control tested.
- What a bias audit actually costs a mid-sized employer, in hours rather than fees.
§ 3 — Structure
The five parts
- 1
Byline block
Your name, your current title and company, and one sentence on why you are credible on this specific topic. Not a general bio.
Write: “30+ years selling and implementing tax and accounting automation into Fortune 500 finance teams.”
Not: “Worked in enterprise software for three decades.”
- 2
Opening150–250 words
Not a warm-up. What have you seen, up close, that most readers have not? Your actual argument should have arrived by the end of this section.
Not: “In today’s rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence…”
- 3
Body600–1,200 words
Make the case with specifics: real objections you have heard, real numbers, real examples — anonymised where that protects a client or an employer. If a paragraph could have been written by someone with no direct experience of the thing, cut it.
- 4
Closing2–4 sentences
One clear takeaway. Do not restate what you have just said; the reader was there.
- 5
Footer biofixed shape
The same every time: name, title, company, one line of context if it is useful, and a LinkedIn link.
§ 4 — House rules
Four things we hold to in the edit
- —First person, direct. Say what you believe, not what “many experts” believe.
- —If you run a company, this is an argument, not an advertisement. Your company name appears in the byline and the footer bio, and nowhere else.
- —Propose one or two working titles. The Council’s editors have the final say on the headline.
- —Anything that reads as generic industry commentary — the kind of paragraph that could sit under anyone’s name — gets cut in the edit.
§ 5 — Worksheet
Start from a scaffold, not a blank page
Fill in each line below, then expand each one into its section. Most of the difficulty in a piece like this is deciding what it is about; once the four body lines exist, the drafting is comparatively easy.
Select it, copy it, and paste it wherever you write.
BYLINE Name, Title at Company CREDIBILITY LINE One sentence on why you specifically can write this. OPENING — the one thing you have seen up close What prompted this article? Two or three sentences. BODY — main points One line each now; each becomes a paragraph when you draft. 01 02 03 04 CLOSING — the one takeaway FOOTER BIO Name is Title at Company. Connect on LinkedIn: [URL]
§ 6 — Sending it
When it is ready
Send it to editor@aiassurancecouncil.org, or reply on your thread if an editor already opened one. No invitation is needed to submit, and the contributor guidelines cover everything this page does not.