Using AI in plan review: Deep dive

Plan review is one of the highest-leverage places to apply AI in a building department — and one of the easiest to get wrong.

This is a hands-on deep dive for plan reviewers, building officials, and anyone curious about how AI can actually help with redlines, code lookups, and completeness checks. Beginners and experienced users are both welcome — we'll start with the fundamentals and push into advanced patterns.

Everything we'll use is free and publicly available (Claude, ChatGPT, Co-Pilot). No vendor pitch, no procurement required.

We'll walk through: • using AI to look up and interpret code provisions in seconds • generating plan review checklists tailored to a specific permit type • checking submittal completeness against your city's requirements • safely summarizing long plan sets and narratives • prompting patterns that avoid common AI mistakes in a review context.

This workshop is completely free, and led by Ed Maclean, the co-founder of set4. set4 is a leading permitting solutions startup, piloting with cities and counties across the nation to deploy AI in their permit workflows.