The new European regulation on artificial intelligence, also known as the AI Act, will require providers to assess their high-risk AI systems against certain requirements. To make this easier for them, a joint committee (JTC 21) of CEN and CENELEC, two European standards organisations, is preparing technical standards that will contain specifications on how to comply with the requirements of the AI Act. In this Chapter we present the results of fieldwork within CEN-CENELEC JTC 21, where we attended group meetings, collected qualitative data on participants and conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with 16 standardisation experts. The study aims to understand the day-to-day work of standardisation experts, who they are and what drove them to standardisation, as well as the difficulties they encounter. Our findings reveal that experts from different stakeholders groups -public and private, big or small companies and so on -do not have the same experience with standardisation. However, they agree that the standardisation system is a complex machine, with processes that are difficult to comprehend, that there is a general lack of experts to work on AI standards, and that it is a highly diplomatic arena, with geopolitical and economic stakes. While many experts are highly critical of the way the current system works, their testimonies also point the way to potential improvements.