AI Might Finally Be Starting to Fix the Broken Permitting Process

 Developers plan around it. Contractors price contingency into it. Municipalities defend it. And everyone quietly accepts that a process which could theoretically take weeks routinely takes months, sometimes years, consuming carrying costs, delaying revenue, and in the case of housing, directly contributing to supply shortages that drive up costs for everyone. The reasons are structural: understaffed building departments, paper-based workflows, fragmented code databases, and application processes that require extensive back-and-forth between applicants and reviewers before a project ever breaks ground. Technology has been promising to fix this for years. A wave of AI-powered platforms is now actually doing it, and the results are beginning to change the calculus for developers, cities, and the broader real estate market.