Artificial Intelligence will soon be playing an important part when local councils consider development applications.
That’s certainly what Wollondilly Shire Council says it plans to do with a $367,598 grant from the Australian Government’s $1.5 billion Housing Support Program.
The funding grant will be spent on injecting AI programs in development assessments.
This is expected to positively impact Development Assessment (DA) processing times as well as consistency of assessment.
“With Wollondilly already fastest in the Greater Sydney area for DA approvals, this will make our processes even faster and more accurate,” says Wollondilly Mayor Matt Gould.
“Planners spend around 5 to 8 hours setting up to do their assessment, researching the controls for an application and preparing the specific assessment template.
“Using AI will result in productivity improvements of 10 to 15 percent per assessment and increased confidence in the accuracy of reports in an increasingly dynamic planning policy environment.
“Each assessment report is then peer reviewed, in part, to ensure all the relevant planning controls have been assessed. This represents about 10 percent of the total time a planner spends in assessment, and 25 percent of the manager’s time.
“By eliminating this tedious and error prone task, planners can spend more time focused on assessing applications on their merit, and senior planners will have more time to dedicate to the most sensitive applications.”
The project will implement AI-powered planner tools at both Wollondilly Shire and Penrith City Councils to expedite the generation of assessment reports, making both councils industry leaders on completion of this project.
Most reference you will read to AI in corporate reports relates to software thad had to wait for faster chips rather than AI as such.