Port Orchard staff testing Permittable AI for plan review while inspections climbed in 2025

At the April 15 Land Use Committee meeting, Nick Bond, the community development director, said Port Orchard is testing a Permittable AI pilot that was authorized by the council in March and is in a calibration phase with staff comparing the AI's reports to human plan-review comments.

"We're just loading an assortment of plans... 12 hours later it sends us a report and says this is what we found," Bond said, describing staff's process of marking the AI's output in green (correct), yellow (partially correct) and red (missed) and returning that material to the vendor to train the system. He said that because inspection activity and plan-review workload picked up, the pilot is moving slower than anticipated and Bond expects the earliest launch in May after additional tuning and multiple concurrent reviews.

Committee members asked how the training step works; Bond said staff upload complete submittals (plans, structural engineering, energy code worksheets and application forms) so the vendor can match the city's comment patterns. He said the goal is for the AI to produce comments similar to what staff provide and that subsequent rounds of testing should accelerate the process.

Bond also reviewed the quarterly inspection report included in the packet. He said staff performed "over 5,000 inspections in 2025," and another committee member corrected that figure to "nearly 6,000." Bond said inspection volume slowed in early 2026 but picked up in mid-March, citing Stetson Ridge activity as an example.

No formal action was taken; committee members asked for continued updates as testing proceeds and for staff to report back once the pilot advances toward production use.