The brainchild of architect and former Urban Development Institute of Australia Gold Coast President and Place Design Group director Finn Jones, Urpla is the latest venture to join the thread of future focused technologies and businesses emerging from the Gold Coast.

Three years in the making, Urpla aims to accelerate and simplify development applications without compromising on quality. The software utilises artificial intelligence technology to analyse and compare historical data and current data to get the right requirements and information that apply to each development site and development application.

With an extensive background in architecture, urban design and development, Jones was driven to launch Urpla when he realised there was a divide between the time and resources planners utilised towards preparing development applications rather than channelling their skills towards urban design outcomes.

“There’s not enough critical thinking because there’s so much focus on report writing for an application,” Jones says.

“That was a big push for me. We need town planners and we need them operating at their best. We need them focused on their roles not the tedium of writing reports,” he notes.

The Gold Coast is seen as a fast-growing metropolitan area – one of the reasons that Jones chose it as Urpla’s pilot city – not wholly unlike many New Zealand cities that are experiencing an influx of growth that we’ve struggled to keep up with.

Jones says Urpla had the potential to revolutionise the planning industry the same way Xero transformed accounting.

“We’ve had a full year of testing and tested more than 500 application types, applying close to 100,000 variables to the application types.

“What we found was the average application was absorbing approximately 12 – 14 hours of report writing time. What we’re hoping to show the industry is that we’ve got that report writing time down to an hour, leaving planners to focus on the planning outcomes.

“We automate the bits that can be automated. We don’t do the planning.

“It reinforces planning schemes. It aligns with what councils want, and because of its clarity, it helps industry align to it as well. It creates efficiency on both sides.

“We want to deliver that value back to planners, better outcomes for cities and create development that is wanted by communities,” said Jones.

Click here to hear from Mott MacDonald’s Maria Mingallon on some other ways that artificial intelligence might be used in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry with our Future of Design series.

This article was first published on newsleads.com.au.