City of Kelowna develops AI tool to speed up building permit applications

The City of Kelowna could be the first municipality in B.C. to use artificial intelligence (AI) to expedite housing permit approvals, according to staff.

Ryan Smith, director of planning and development services for the Central Okanagan municipality, says the city used a $350,000 grant it received from the provincial Local Government Development Approvals Program to work with Microsoft in developing an AI chatbot that automates permit applications and answers applicants' questions about the city's zoning bylaws and official community plan.

Smith expects the automation system, which is set to be launched this fall, to save lots of time for frontline city staff.

"Twenty years ago, I was a young guy working at the front counter at city hall — I used seven or eight hours a day answering similar questions over and over…and being a new guy, you don't know everything and so sometimes you make mistake," Smith told host Chris Walker on CBC's Daybreak South.

"For some of our frontline staff, if we can save them 20, 30 or 40 per cent of their time answering the same questions, [it] also increases consistency that allows us to redeploy them on higher value tasks."

Announced in September 2021, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs' development approvals program has given 43 municipalities across the province nearly $15 million to help them develop innovative ways of streamlining the housing approval process.

Chatbot won't replace staff, city says

Kelowna is part of a growing trend of municipalities across Canada using AI in their operations. 

In London, Ont., for instance, the city's information technology and homeless prevention departments worked together in 2020 to build the Chronic Homelessness Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) model to predict whether people are likely to seek shelter services, or find themselves living rough on a long-term basis in the next six months.

Matt Ross, a manager of artificial intelligence and information technology for London, said the model boasts a 93 per cent accuracy rating.

"It's a pretty powerful model," said Ross. "We're doing literature review right now of other cities that have tried to approach the problem with machine learning and this accuracy is, as far as we can tell, the highest in the world."

In Kelowna, Smith says the city will start testing the chatbot in the summer. 

He emphasizes that the technology won't replace frontline staff because the city still needs humans to monitor its performance, and there is a lot of planning and development work to be done in the Central Okanagan, which is Canada's fastest-growing region according to census data.

"I can pretty safely say that staff should not feel insecure about their positions at all — there will always be work for them to do," he said.

Smith says the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for B.C. has advised the City of Kelowna of the standards it needs to follow in protecting privacy of building permit applicants.