Urban Compass: The AI tool rewriting Australia’s planning future

Australia’s town-planning system could soon see major changes, with Queensland technology company Urban Compass showcasing an artificial-intelligence tool it says can dramatically cut approval times for development applications.

At the 2025 Local Government Association of Queensland (LGAQ) conference, the company demonstrated its AI Planning Assistant, a system designed to automate key parts of the development-assessment process.

Co-founder Ganesh Srivenkatesh told JtA News the platform was built to help address Australia’s ongoing “building crisis” and “planning crisis”.

“What Urban Compass is offering is an AI planning tool where the building crisis or the planning crisis we are going through in Australia — this can elevate the situation for us,” Srivenkatesh said.

He said the existing planning process often took too long because officers lacked digital tools to manage the growing volume of regulatory requirements.

“The planning submission takes longer if you don’t have a tool that can assist them, going through all the compliance laws, the legislation, the overlays.

“So what we are doing is automating that using AI technology so that when someone comes and talks to the council, they can get their application checked, pre-assessment, and get approved swiftly.”

According to Srivenkatesh, approvals that once took “a month and a bit” could be completed “in less than a week or less than ten days.”

Co-founder and former City of Moreton Bay councillor Adrian Raedel said faster approvals would be essential as Australia prepared for major national projects.

“Whether that’s venues for the Olympics, whether it’s venues for practice, whether it’s housing, whether it’s hospitality needs — the only way they’re gonna do it is if they’ve got tools like this to get it going and get it happening on the ground,” Raedel said.

Srivenkatesh said the system supports both planning officers and community applicants by validating information as it is submitted.

“The agents behind the scene, they understand the compliance requirements, the legal requirements, and what is required for processing.

“So as a customer or a ratepayer, if I’m talking to the council, I’m being coached automatically to say, ‘Look, this is the information you need to provide to us,’ and it keeps checking and validating.

“So when I’m within the council as a planner, I’ll get something that’s complete.

“I don’t have to chase the ratepayer saying, ‘Can you give me this additional document? Can you give me this additional plan?’ I don’t need to do that.”

Raedel concluded that the technology was intended to make planners’ work more strategic, not replace them.

“Town planners have human time pressures as opposed to our AI,” Raedel said. “They’ll become more strategic.

“They’ll become more important when it becomes a hard application to make, where it needs to be really focused on what the issue is and how to solve those issues.

“So it’s certainly not scary for town planners — it just opens up the opportunities to work on some amazingly different projects that are probably a little more complex.”

Urban Compass describes its Planning Assistant as an Australian-developed solution that automates compliance checks and integrates with existing council processes. At the LGAQ 2025 event, the founders said the goal was to demonstrate how emerging technology can support faster approvals and stronger collaboration between councils and communities.