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McLEAN, Va. – Digital tools are having a bigger impact for building officials, especially in permitting and inspection systems, speakers said at the 2026 Building Innovation Conference, an annual meeting of the construction industry, May 19-20.
Discussions during the event, organized by the National Institute of Building Sciences, focused on data and connected systems, along with their growing importance. One of the clearest examples came from the Department of Buildings in Washington, DC, where officials described several recent efforts to shorten permitting timelines and reduce review bottlenecks.
For example, the department has consolidated parts of its building permit and certificate of occupancy process into a single workflow, said Nicole Rogers, DC DOB buildings manager.
“This streamlined the process by consolidating the two, so the review and inspection could be completed in less than 15 business days,” Rogers said. “Traditionally, the process was held for more than 60 days.”
Rogers added that the city also created instant permits for small repairs and solar installations. That allowed homeowners to get approvals in less than two minutes, he said.
These types of fast-track permitting systems could significantly improve construction and review timelines, said Joan O’Neil, chief knowledge officer at the International Code Council.
“Building departments modernized with technology and solutions can increase permit issuance by 80 percent,” O’Neil said. “We know technology can streamline permitting, and we also know that’s the biggest bottleneck we hear in terms of slowing down construction.”
Artificial intelligence in construction
The conference also focused on how visual artificial intelligence and digital inspection technologies allowed officials to remotely review job sites and identify potential problems before they set foot on site.
For example, Stephen DeVito, chief technology officer at Procon, a construction management and technology company based in McLean, Virginia, described a project with the General Services Administration where inspectors virtually walked through a building before arriving on site using continuously captured visual records and spatial modeling tools.
“[The inspector] he said he knew the building so well that when he got there, he ended up being able to do two floors a day,” DeVito said. “This is just the beginning of what this technology can do.”
These types of tools give officials and inspection teams more context and visibility into the work in progress, DeVito said.
“The ability to map what the actual evidence is at any given time, that will help more with inspections,” DeVito said. “We have over 100 inspectors in our company and they have adopted this technology quickly.”
AI came up repeatedly throughout the conference, although several examples focused more on simulations and potential than fully deployed field systems.
A team at tech giant Procore, for example, trained an AI system using thousands of pages from the NIBS Whole Building Design Guide, said Blake Shiver, Procore’s general manager of public sector. The team then powered the tool to generate a detailed disaster response and reconstruction strategy for a hypothetical hurricane scenario involving displaced residents and damaged oil infrastructure.
“We can take something that might have taken months to sequence with older technology and bring it down to minutes,” Shiver said. “This will save lives.”
Shiver also said AI could help preserve institutional knowledge as experienced workers retire from the industry.
“It effectively took decades and generations of wisdom and allowed me to apply it in context in minutes,” Shiver said. “We never had this capability before.”
However, AI systems still require guardrails, such as human supervision and continuous feedback loops, said Colin Whitlatch, chief technology officer at Kahua, an Alpharetta, Georgia-based provider of construction management software. He added that automatic decisions are not being made in the company.
“We operate on something called ‘human in the loop,'” Whitlatch said. “Because one thing is AI, with limited exceptions, never says ‘no’.”
Implementing AI can also lead to additional administrative burdens, said David Jackson, a consultant and founder of the Code Advisory Group, which works with tribal nations on code adoption and inspections. Using AI tools, Jackson described situations where inspectors had to complete both handwritten inspection forms and digital documents simultaneously.
“I have yet to leave a carbon copy. I have yet to leave written documentation at the workplace,” Jackson said. “So it’s almost a doubling of my workload to manually fill out 100+ inspection tickets, physically drop them off at the job site, go back to the computer, upload my notes verbatim.”
