Contrary to the belief that companies resist regulation, UL's customers often initiate the standards-creation process for new innovations. They view universal standards as a way to de-risk technology, ensure fair competition, and create a stable, trusted marketplace.
UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon enforces a strict policy of never overruling the scientific and engineering judgments of her lab technicians. This protects the integrity of their testing process, which is the foundation of the company's brand and business.
Protecting the UL mark's value requires active enforcement. The company maintains a market surveillance and anti-counterfeiting team that collaborates with customs and competitors to find and legally pursue sellers on platforms like Amazon using fraudulent UL certifications.
UL achieves widespread adoption not through federal law, but by embedding safety standards into a single major city's legislation (e.g., NYC for e-bikes). This forces manufacturers to adopt that standard globally to avoid producing multiple, costly product versions.
Jennifer Scanlon, CEO of UL Solutions, confirms that a core part of their safety work involves destructive testing. Her own office is situated above a hazardous location testing lab and occasionally shakes from the controlled explosions, highlighting the physical nature of the work.
Faced with non-deterministic AI models, UL's approach to safety certification isn't to test the code's output. It audits the development process, focusing on over 200 criteria for how humans make decisions about data veracity, bias, transparency, and privacy.
UL's relevance isn't based on a single source of power. It's a combination of insurance companies requiring certification to underwrite policies, various government agencies mandating it, and the high stakes of the US tort system, where certification can be a key defense in liability lawsuits.
To compete with for-profit rivals, UL split its testing business (UL Solutions) from its standards and research arms. The for-profit company went public in a secondary offering, with the proceeds funding the non-profit's endowment to continue its safety science work.