The City of Calgary, Alberta, partnered with CivCheck to test AI-assisted plan review across 30 bylaw regulations and 60 document completeness checks. The engagement demonstrated that CivCheck can handle Calgary's layered regulatory structure — including base zones, overlays, and Direct Control district conditions — flagging intake gaps before review begins and standardizing checks that previously relied on individual reviewer judgment.

Calgary's zoning framework is one of Canada's most layered and conditional. Depending on where a project is located, a different combination of base zoning, overlay conditions, and Direct Control (DC) district rules will apply — each potentially modifying setbacks, height limits, and other development standards. That variability is hard to manage consistently, and inconsistency has a direct cost for applicants: unpredictable timelines, contradictory feedback between reviewers, and delays that compound with every correction cycle.

To address this, the city partnered with CivCheck, a Clariti company, to apply Guided AI Plan Review to the two root causes of permitting delays: document completeness at intake, and zoning compliance checks where reviewer interpretation tends to vary. CivCheck is Clariti's Guided AI Plan Review™ solution, designed to accelerate plan review and permit approvals without replacing human judgment. Its AI copilots help applicants submit approvable applications on the first try, and city reviewers get through reviews faster with structured, rule-based compliance checks.

The Challenge

Calgary reviews development permits and building permits together, requiring applicants to satisfy both zoning and building code requirements in a single submission. When it's not clear upfront what's required, applicants often don't discover their plans are incomplete until they're already in review — triggering correction cycles, resubmissions, and weeks of added delay. Three issues compounded the problem:

• No automated intake checks. Plan completeness was verified manually using checklists that weren't always tailored to the specific application, making it easy for gaps to slip through to review.
• Complex, layered zoning rules. Calgary's zoning framework involves multiple overlapping rule sets that can each modify what's required for a given project. Applying the right combination consistently across reviewers is difficult to do manually.
• Unpredictable permitted use decisions. Some applications that should qualify for a straightforward building permit get routed into additional review loops, adding significant time to the process.

The Solution

CivCheck's AI platform was configured to Calgary's specific regulatory structure, covering 30 bylaw regulations across five residential permit application types. The scope focused on checks most likely to generate inconsistency or delay: building height, amenity space, setbacks, projections, driveways, and parking.

On the document side, CivCheck ran 60 completeness checks across 12 plan and document types, applying intake rules specific to each application's scope of work rather than a generic checklist.

Key results from the engagement:

• Missing drawings caught before review began. CivCheck's AI flagged absent plumbing and gas drawings at intake, before the application entered the formal review queue. Under the prior process, this type of gap would have been discovered mid-review, triggering a correction cycle and resetting the clock.
• Amenity space evaluation standardized. Rather than leaving combined area calculations, minimum dimension verification, and non-usable space determinations to individual reviewer judgment, CivCheck applied structured rule logic to each check. Every application was evaluated the same way, every time.
• Permitted use validation moved earlier in the process. CivCheck demonstrated that pre-check logic can clarify whether a proposal meets permitted use criteria before it enters the review queue — preserving regulatory oversight while eliminating unnecessary routing into extended review loops.

Before and After

The Opportunity at Scale

CivCheck demonstrated it can handle Calgary's regulatory complexity, including the layered interaction between base zones, overlays, and DC district conditions. Across comparable jurisdictions that have deployed CivCheck, residential plan review times have been reduced by 35 to 90 percent (averaging 70 percent), with individual checks that previously took 4 to 10 minutes now completed in approximately 75 seconds. On average across those jurisdictions, cities save 81 days per permit and complete 4 fewer review cycles per application.

A full deployment in Calgary, with dynamic regulatory layering applied across the full range of project types and zoning conditions, points to three concrete outcomes: