Across government agencies, one theme keeps coming up: staff need to do more with less. Reviewers are juggling high volumes of complex plan sets while applicants struggle through back-and-forth corrections that can stretch a single permit into a multi-week process. It’s no surprise that municipalities are asking how artificial intelligence can help.
Every city and county planning department knows the struggle. Staff spend countless hours reviewing incomplete or non-compliant plan sets, only to send them back for revision. Most permit applications fail their first code check, creating long feedback loops that slow development and strain limited resources.
Manual plan review isn’t just time consuming. It’s also inconsistent, costly and difficult to scale as communities grow. That’s why more municipalities are exploring how artificial intelligence in electronic plan review can create faster, fairer, and more predictable outcomes.
At e-PlanSoft, we’re already turning that vision into action. We’re partnering with forward-thinking jurisdictions to test our first AI capabilities, starting with Pre-Plan Check and Review Assistance. These are two innovations designed to drive faster, smarter, and more consistent plan reviews. Our initial model has been created and our beta-working prototype is complete.
The earliest opportunity for efficiency lies before plan review even begins. With e-PlanSoft’s AI Pre-Plan Check, an intelligent model trained on local building and zoning codes will automatically review plan submissions the moment they’re uploaded.
The system will instantly evaluate each file for completeness and compliance, generating a 0-100 AI score with clear explanations by category, such as building code, fire safety, and zoning. Applicants will receive annotated feedback that shows exactly what to fix before the plan reaches a reviewer.
For agencies, that means:
Cities can even decide whether to require corrections before submission or simply flag issues for staff visibility. Either way, every plan will enter review with fewer errors and better data.
Once plans reach the review stage, e-PlanSoft’s AI Review Assistant will provide practical, reviewer-controlled automation. Using advanced language and image models, the tool will interpret code requirements, detect potential violations, summarize repetitive comments, and even automates scaling and measurement checks.
Key capabilities include:
This will save hours on each plan while improving consistency across departments. Reviewers remain in control while AI simply does the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
Our AI capabilities will deliver meaningful time savings and measurable efficiency gains across both intake and review, helping agencies clear backlogs, move applications through the queue faster, and meet service-level expectations without sacrificing quality or compliance.
AI Pre-Plan Check
In the intake stage, for a municipality processing 5,000 plans per year, AI Pre-Plan Check reduces the number of plan sets that require manual review by roughly 94%. That equals about 2,125 reviewer hours saved every year—more than an entire work-year of a full-time employee.
The result is fewer bottlenecks, faster applicant responses, and a noticeable reduction in the backlog that slows development projects.
AI Review Assistance
In the review stage, AI Review Assistance will streamline repetitive, manual tasks such as measurement, scaling, and comment management. For a municipality reviewing 5,000 plans per year, that equates to roughly 15,000 hours saved annually, a 30% reduction in total review time.
Agencies can beat their SLAs, accelerate approvals, and still ensure safe, compliant buildings—without cutting corners or compromising standards.
At e-PlanSoft, we believe AI should support reviewers, not replace them. That belief shapes every step of our roadmap, from pre-plan automation to intelligent review assistance, designed to make plan review faster, more consistent, and less manual for both agencies and applicants.
If your municipality wants to explore AI-assisted plan review and help shape how automation supports public service, we invite you to join our early adopter program. Please contact our Head of Product at mabbitt@eplansoft.com to get started.