Imagine radically speeding up the time it takes to treat residential and infrastructure planning applications in England, advise to make faster, more informed decisions and drive growth throughout the economy, all thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). This vision becomes a reality thanks to a unique new system called Extract. As British Prime Minister Keir Stormer outlined in his speech at London Tech Week, Extract was built by the British government’s AI -In -Incluator team (I.AI) who chose Google’s Gemini model for his ability to understand text, reason about images, use tools and more.
The challenge of traditional planning
Traditional planning applications often require complex, paper -based documents. Comparison of applications with local planning restrictions and approvals is a time -consuming task. Extract helps advice to quickly convert their mountains of planning documents to digital structured data, drastically reducing barriers to adopting modern digital planning systems and the need to manually control about 350,000 planning applications in England every year.
When the councils start using excerpts, they will be able to provide more effective planning services with simpler processes and democratized information, reduce the council’s workload and accelerate the planning processes for the public. However, the conversion of a single planning document is currently taking up to 2 hours for a planning professional – and there are hundreds of thousands of documents sitting in archiving cabinets across the country. Extract can remove this bottleneck by speeding up the conversion with AI.
As the British government highlights, “the new generative AI tool will reverse old planning documents – including blurred cards and handwritten notes – to clear, digital data in just 40 seconds – drastically reduces the time it takes planners.”
Using modern data and software, the advice will be able to make informed decisions faster, which can lead to faster application processing times for things like home improvements, and more time has been released for Council staff to focus on strategic planning. Extract is tested with planning officials in four tips around the country, including Hillingdon Council, Westminster City Council, Nuneaton and Bedworth Council and Exeter City Council and will be made available to all tips by spring of 2026.
Gemini: Activating innovation within the British government
A new approach built with Gemini via Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform transforms complicated planning documents into user-friendly digital cards and information in a way that was never possible. I.AI found that Gemini was uniquely suitable for the complexity of this task because of its advanced multimodal reasoning and ability to tackle challenging analytical problems.
How it works:
Extracts use Gemini to ‘read’ complicated planning documents and draw the critical information stored in text, handwritten comments and images of poor quality. This is only possible now due to Gemini’s multimodal reasoning and tool -use features.
- Polygon extraction: Gemini’s visual reasoning features recognize the relevant features of a map based on the context of the document (eg a red border around a number of townhouses, a black shady region covering a park or 32-66 of a street address, but only numbers). Extract is then given access to tools such as Opencv, Ordnance Survey and Segmented Something that can extract the complex forms from images that define where the planning limits apply.
- GEOREFERFERNCING: Gemini identifies addresses, intersections and landmarks visible on the map to generate a modern, geoloked version of the card with Ordnance Survey. Extract then uses functional mapping models, such as Loftr, to find a transformation that converts the historical map to the modern equivalent by matching common features within the two images. Extraction uses this mapping to convert the extracted polygon form from pixels to precise geographical coordinates.