Key Facts

• The UK government's Augmented Planning Decisions tool is being developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, Google DeepMind, and Faculty, and is currently being alpha tested with the London Borough of Barnet, Dorset Council, and London Borough of Camden local planning authorities.
• The Extract tool, developed internally by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Incubator for AI, has been rolled out to all councils across England, and is expected to save the average council around 255 hours of manual work digesting documents into digital form.
• Google Cloud's platform is providing the secure, enterprise-grade foundation required to develop these innovations, utilizing Gemini on Google Cloud to ensure advanced reasoning and data sovereignty and security.
• The Augmented Planning Decisions tool is planned to be made available to councils nationally from 2027, with Google Cloud ready to provide the elastic infrastructure needed to scale the service to all 300+ local authorities across the country.
• The collaboration involves a powerful ecosystem including the policy expertise of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the technical ability of the Incubator for AI, the cutting-edge research and engineering of Google DeepMind, and the delivery expertise of Faculty.