How AI is Powering Smarter Councils
From Paper to Progress: How AI is Powering Smarter Councils!
To help meet the UK’s ambitious housing targets, most notably the Plan for Change goal of building 1.5 million homes, councils are turning to AI to modernise outdated planning systems. An experimental tool is now enabling them to convert old handwritten notes, scanned PDFs, and paper records into clean, digital data in seconds. What once took planners hours can now be completed almost instantly. This is a huge leap forward, allowing councils to reduce backlogs, make faster, smarter planning decisions, and ultimately serve communities more efficiently. This is a vital step in unlocking growth and delivering the homes Britain urgently needs.
We've seen the power of this first hand, in both public and private sectors. In one project we worked on with a local authority, we used AI machine learning models to help identify key combinations of events and background circumstances that could increase a child's vulnerability of becoming LAC (a Looked After Child) in the future. We are also using our AI solutions to great effect in the private sector to digitise over 40,000 handwritten delivery tickets, match them to core systems, and dramatically speed up invoice processing for a large haulage company. You can check out the case study here
AI’s potential extends far beyond councils and hauliers, it can be applied across any sector where manual, outdated processes are slowing progress. By automating routine admin and data processing, AI frees up staff to focus on what matters most. It’s great to see the public sector now embracing these powerful tools to deliver better outcomes.
4 Apr 2025
