Noetic in the Austin Business Journal: the city is testing our AI for site plan review

The Austin Business Journal reported this month that Austin Development Services is testing Noetic's AI tool for site plan review. The reporter, Sean Hemmersmeier, put the early results simply: the tool is good at catching the "low-hanging fruit" that slows projects down.

That coverage follows the KVUE segment in May, when Austin's ABC affiliate first reported on the pilot.

If you've never had to file a site plan, it's easy to miss how much time gets lost here. Before a commercial or multifamily project can break ground, the drawings have to pass a stack of separate rulebooks: zoning, drainage, transportation, environmental, fire. Each one belongs to a different city department. Miss a single requirement and the whole plan comes back for another round. Each round can cost weeks, and weeks cost money.

That's the problem the pilot is aimed at. According to the ABJ, the work started in January, when Noetic co-founder and CEO Heidi Laki began talking with Dr. Eric Johnson, an Austin assistant city manager who oversees development services and economic development. Johnson has long pushed to make it easier and faster to start projects in the city, on the argument that quicker development feeds the wider economy.

Here's how it works today. City reviewers aren't running the tool yet. The firms that submit applications are. Noetic's AI is trained on Austin's building code and regulations, and it reads through site plans and other permitting documents to flag problems early, so they can be fixed before a plan is filed instead of after it comes back. Noetic has also brought engineering firms into the test so the tool gets used on real submissions.

The early numbers are encouraging. A May city memo cited by the ABJ found that Noetic's tool is already catching about 82% of the comments a human reviewer would flag.

One of those firms is Dunaway. Vanessa Mendez, an entitlement manager there, has been using the tool for about three months. "It's able to catch a lot of kind of low hanging fruit kind of comments that end up just bogging down the process, like 'You're missing a note on this page. Update this table here,'" she told the ABJ. Clearing those before submission, she said, lets her team "feel a little bit more confident that what we're turning into the city" has already had the obvious issues caught.

Neither Mendez nor Laki sees the tool as a stand-in for people. The hard part of site plan review is engineering judgment, and that stays with the humans. "Where it's not as good is the subjective judgment ... where you have technical engineering judgment that has to be applied," Laki told the ABJ. "It doesn't have enough data, and it doesn't have the level of the subjectivity that you earn when you're a battle-hardened guy working for the city of Austin for 20 years."

For Mendez, that split is the whole point. When the routine catches happen on their own, the time her team would have spent on them goes somewhere better. "If we need to go and meet with the city to discuss an actual design issue, that's where our time is best put," she said.

There's still a lot to work out. Austin and Noetic are figuring out where the tool helps and where it doesn't, and a full report is due to the city's Economic Opportunity Council Committee this fall. Noetic is also in early conversations with other local governments, both in Texas and beyond, though Laki told the ABJ it matters to prove the technology in Austin first. Mendez thinks other governments around Austin could pick it up too, if it holds up.

What's at stake is bigger than any one permit. As Laki told the ABJ, the goal is "to enable people to build more housing, get it online faster, enable our supply to increase, and potentially even make supply that they wouldn't have in the past, because they just didn't know if it was going to get approved."