The AI conundrum

AI was a hot topic at UKREiiF last month, but how is it really impacting planning and development?

Artificial Intelligence is obviously the hot topic in every sector at the moment: how you use it, how you should use it, how is everyone else using it, the best platform, whether it’ll do us all out of a job – the list goes on. Let’s face it, we’ve seen it coming for a while, but the speed at which it has permeated every aspect of our lives – and work – has been quite astonishing. Despite our best intentions to keep up with the beast, it feels like many businesses are picking up the pieces and trying to reverse engineer best practice, efficiencies and safeguards. But is it a good or bad thing for public consultation?

I sat in on a few panels at UKREiiF that addressed the challenges (and some unexpected upsides) to AI in the planning world, which were really thought provoking. What I didn’t come away with was the feeling that anybody had the answers – we’re all just trying to deal with the challenges.

Take AI in a planning consultation scenario…

The pros:

·      The use of AI can encourage under-represented audiences to engage and share their views

·      It (generally) reaches a younger demographic – a sector that developers are always keen to hear from

·      We can use it to quickly digest and analyse surveys and data – a win, right?

·      AI can help distil technical jargon and tricky planning law into easily accessible chunks, helpful for explaining and sharing the fundamentals

·      It can write you a supportive letter to your LPA in a few taps of a keyboard (or voicenote).

The cons:

·      The use of AI can encourage the enthusiastic NIMBY audience to share their views more widely

·      It also enables a lot of uninformed, misleading and untrue (but fairly well written) petitions, campaigns and myths to perpetuate

·      We can use it to quickly digest and analyse surveys and data – but it has a tendency to hallucinate and often makes something up if it doesn’t know the answer!

·      AI can help distil technical jargon and tricky planning law – which in turn can lead to everyone being an expert in planning policy (except they’re not…)

·      It can write you a 200-page objection letter to your LPA in a few taps of a keyboard

You get the picture – it’s a sharp double-edged sword. For us at Comm Comm, any kind of tool or mechanism that makes it easier for people to engage with development and construction is a positive thing. We want to reach more people, we want them to be supportive of schemes, share their views, be involved in honing the community benefits and build strong links with the delivery partners. But one thing we are very clear about is that human oversight, experience and empathy is something that a digital tool cannot (yet) replicate. AI can’t knock on doors and speak to residents; it can’t attend a youth group to chat about aspirations or mediate in a difficult conversation between a landlord and a tenant. It can’t run a community fun day and or pop-up event at the local shops and it doesn’t know individuals within communities the way we do.

And what’s the upside for the (already under resourced) planning departments receiving unmanageable numbers of objections, written by computers not people. The launch of Objector AI last year has threatened to ‘grind the planning system to a halt’ (according to some overwhelmed colleagues), with the Government launching Extract AI to counter the amount of paperwork and help LAs streamline applications. This has not yet been rolled out nationally, but the NIMBY AI continues to run at a pace.

What is clear, is that it is becoming a head-to-head race on both sides of the planning conversation, so how can we reach a position what is beneficial to us all?

We’d love to know more about how you’re using AI in your business and any tips you’d like to share about how it is positively impacting planning and development dialogue.

Hannah Grogan, Head of Operations