AI can help us read between the lines when engaging stakeholders

By Julian Pearce, Founder of communications agency Yasper

Planning reform is heading our way, and the tools that developers and their partners use to engage with stakeholders and communities will play a vital role.

With what the Government termed “seismic reforms” published on Tuesday, for the first time, we saw the meat on the bones of what changes Labour hopes to make to the way we build in this country, and it has implications for all areas of development: housing, transport, infrastructure and commercial.

Public consultation and meeting those parties who will be affected by a development face-to-face is important for several reasons. You can genuinely listen to concerns and address them at an early stage. It is also an opportunity to build relationships and secure buy-in for the long-term.

One aspect of the planning process that has gone through a transformation in relatively recent years is the way that we engage communities.

Whereas in the not-so distant past, consultations would substantially involve presenting to a parish council and sitting in an invariably cold and dingy church hall, explaining your plans to residents, followed by a flurry of letters to your local planning department, things are markedly different today. Digital advancements have allowed us to seek better data about views on development, which in turn has led to a more insight-focused system.

Engaging in a way that not only meets requirements but provides important and valuable feedback is something that companies are increasingly striving to achieve. The word ‘meaningful’ tends to crop up a lot and suggests that consultation is continuing its transition away from a box-ticking exercise and being recognised for the potential value it holds.

It is not unusual for a planning application to receive hundreds, if not thousands of responses. It’s vital that these views are listened to, carefully analysed and acted upon, if appropriate.

However, it’s easy for organisations to fall into a trap of focusing on numbers, and the quantitative data that is spat out the other side of a consultation, and not paying adequate heed to the trends and nuances of public opinion.

AI can help in this quest for understanding.

Such consultations are usually made up of a mix of questions that deliver quantitative scores and verbatim responses. Not every view will fit neatly into a box, yet it’s important to let respondents say exactly what they think.

But these responses can run to hundreds of words, often sprawling in nature, and not always written in completely coherent sentence structure, making summarising them time consuming and potentially impractical.

These responses do, however, often contain nuggets of information that can prove invaluable to a development and its developers. The public at large are a rich source of information and insight that you can ill-afford to ignore.

With the proviso that adequate quality assurances, safeguards and data protection measures are in place, AI has an important role to play in spotting trends and sentiment that may be missed by the human eye.

A recent engagement exercise Yasper ran on behalf of a local authority gathered an impressive 720 responses within a two-week window. Embracing technology to help us analyse some of the data was an important factor in being able to deliver a comprehensive and well-rounded map of opinion.

There are clear applications where AI shouldn’t be used, not least for moral reasons, but part of the challenge for businesses is working out when it should. An AI-enabled consultation process can deliver the ability to more accurately map sentiment about a project and should be embraced to this end.

One of the best arguments I’ve seen for utilising AI is that it doesn’t make a job ‘ten times quicker’, rather it gives you the ability to make your work ‘ten times better’ in the available timeframe.

Ignore those opportunities at your peril.