What is the AI Planning History Summary?
The AI Planning History Summary helps you cut through the planning noise and reduce the time spent sifting through planning applications that aren't relevant to you.
Now, you'll get a brief summary highlighting the most important - and most relevant - applications from inside the Assessment panel on the right side of your map.
This feature uses generative AI to summarise all the important planning applications and appeals associated with a site.
Watch a full walk-through from our Product Manager, Veronika here:
What benefits does the AI Planning History Summary offer?
You'll get an easy-to-read quick summary of relevant planning applications associated with the site you're interested in. We'll:
Highlight the important applications and summarise these in more detail
Group applications based on residential, commercial or other, so you can focus on applications most relevant to your needs
List major and most recent applications first, and minor applications second
How do I use the AI Planning History Summary?
All Unlimited customers have access to the AI Planning History summary. To use it, simply:
Click on a site on the Map view
The Assessment panel on the right will instantly appear, from here: click the Planning History tab
If there are planning applications associated with the site, you'll see a 'Generate Summary' button
Click the button, and a summary of the planning history of the site will be generated
How are planning applications prioritised?
We've implemented a 4-level hierarchy for prioritising planning applications in the AI Planning History Summary.
Planning applications type based ranking:
a. Primary applications of interest: we summarise these first and in most detail
Full application
EIA
Reserved matters
Outline
b. Secondary applications: we provide a brief summary
Change of use
c. Further applications: we highlight existence of these applications
Discharge of conditions
GPDR
TPO
Listed Building
2. With Primary applications of interest and Further applications, we group residential, commercial and other applications together.
3. Under residential primary applications of interest, we summarise:
Major applications first (where the number of dwellings is 10 or more)
Minor applications second
4. Newest applications summarised first, based on decision date
What type of AI do we use?
Currently we are using the OpenAI API’s GPT-4o model (GPT-4o was released in May 2024; we are using a version that was updated in August, ("o" for "omni").
GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer and is a multimodal large language model.
Are there any limitations with the AI Planning History Summary?
Even though generative AI has made great strides, this is still machine-generated text. The model selects words and phrases from a vast set, based on their probabilities. Therefore, it should not be used exclusively to make decisions. It is designed to give a quick overview or potentially large numbers of planning applications but it does not replace planners.
Summarisation is not a fully deterministic task. Even when specific parameters are carefully set, there's no guarantee the output will be identical every time. As a result, you may receive slightly different versions of the text with each attempt.