Building consent lodged in 7 calendar days

From a signed engagement to a lodged building consent in 7 calendar days. Not by working nights, and not by cutting the drawings short. A building consent is not one task, it is a chain of them, and we run the whole chain on our own AI and automation, trained on the way we work.

1 · A consent is a chain, not a drawing

The design is settled early. What eats the calendar is everything after it: drawing it up, writing the specification to match, checking both against the code, assembling the package, and filing it with the council. Every stage is exact and unforgiving. A missing reference, or a spec that contradicts the drawing, comes straight back as a council query. By hand, on a single house, that chain is weeks of an architect's time, and every revision ripples through all of it.

2 · One workflow, end to end

So we automated the chain, not one link of it. The same trained approach runs each stage:

Draw — the architectural drawings, dimensioned, tagged and detailed to our standards.

Specify — the written specification, assembled from the same source as the drawings so the two cannot drift apart.

Check — the package audited against the council's checklist and our own, the same [AI review](/ai/8-building-consents-in-27-days/) that cleared 8 consents in 27 days.

File — the package assembled and lodged with the council, not keyed in by hand.

None of it is a tool bought off a shelf. It is trained on our own standards, the way we have always drawn and checked, so it works less like a macro than like someone who has absorbed how we work.

3 · Built over years, fast only now

And it compounds. Every project we run through it teaches it more, so it does more of the chain, and does it better, than the last. None of this is overnight. The speed is recent — AI only got good in the last 6 months — but what it stands on is not: years of templates, checklists and a comprehensive technical library built long before any of this could run itself.

4 · What it means for you

When the whole chain stops taking weeks, two things change. Consents move faster, because drawing, specifying, checking and filing run in days rather than one after another across weeks. And the time once spent on all of it goes back into the design — the judgment that still has to be ours.

*Why we integrate AI at all, and where a person stays in charge, is in* [**Towards AI Integration**](/ai/towards-ai-integration/).