Canada’s Capital, the City of Ottawa, Launches AI PreCheck to Accelerate Permitting

• Ottawa launches Archistar AI PreCheck pilot to streamline residential permitting workflows and reduce unnecessary review cycles.
• The City of Ottawa will pilot Completeness Check for single- and semi-detached houses, townhouses/row houses, and duplexes.
• AI-powered Compliance Analysis will assess single-detached house designs against Ottawa zoning bylaws and Ontario Building Code requirements.

Ottawa, Ontario – As Canada’s capital city and the country’s fourth-largest municipality, the City of Ottawa is balancing rapid growth with increasing pressure on its planning and permitting systems.

Upon incorporating in 1855, Ottawa derived its name from the indigenous Algonquin word “Odawa,” meaning “to trade,” appropriate for its location at the convergence of the Ottawa, Rideau, and Gatineau rivers. Today, it’s an urban city with a thriving high-tech sector (including Dropbox, Shopify, and ADP). It’s also known for its natural beauty and expansive green space, nicely situated between Toronto and Montreal in southeastern Ontario.

All this makes Ottawa an attractive place to live. Now, with a growing population of 1.2 million people and counting, Ottawa faces rising residential permit volumes, growing regulatory complexity, and permitting delays caused by difficult code reviews and incomplete or inconsistent submissions.

As a result, the City of Ottawa is modernizing how housing gets approved by launching a pilot of the Archistar AI PreCheck platform. As part of the initiative, Ottawa is using AI PreCheck’s Completeness Check and Compliance Analysis capabilities to streamline residential permitting workflows and reduce unnecessary review cycles.

The AI PreCheck pilot is designed to address those bottlenecks before they slow down staff and applicants alike. The project will focus on low-rise residential permit workflows and includes both Completeness Check and Compliance Analysis functionality.

Ottawa will trial Completeness Check for:

• Single-detached houses
• Semi-detached houses
• Townhouses and row houses
• Duplexes

Completeness Check acts as an automated intake quality gate, verifying that submissions contain the required drawings, annotations, documents, and supporting information before they enter formal review. The system automatically identifies missing or inconsistent items, helping applicants correct issues before submission and reducing avoidable resubmission cycles.

The pilot will also evaluate Archistar’s Compliance Analysis technology for single-detached house designs against:

• The Ottawa Zoning Bylaw
• Ontario Building Code Part 9 requirements for housing and small buildings

The zoning analysis will explore automation opportunities for checks such as setbacks, building heights, floor area ratios, and impervious areas. The Ontario Building Code analysis will assess key residential provisions, including:

• Doors and windows
• Stairways and guards
• Fire protection
• Foundations
• Floors-on-ground
• Spatial design requirements

Using deterministic, rule-based logic; computer vision; and machine learning, Compliance Analysis evaluates submitted drawings against digitized regulations and provides transparent outputs that include explicit code citations, extracted measured values, pass/fail determinations, and visual evidence linked directly to plan sheets.

Working with the local government in Ottawa will provide valuable insights into the city’s zoning bylaw and the Ontario Building Code (OBC). Automating processes and improving communication between applicants and the city’s planning and building department increases transparency, accuracy, and customer satisfaction by streamlining the permitting process.

Speeding up the process will reduce holding costs for applicants, accelerate property tax revenue collection for the city, support its housing supply and development goals, and allow staff to focus on higher-value technical and strategic work rather than repetitive administrative screening.

“The City of Ottawa has made clear their high priority in solving core planning and building challenges,” says Joe Philbrook, Archistar’s Vice President of Customer. “Our Archistar AI PreCheck pilot is designed to provide instant, automated feedback on submissions. The goal is to reduce application rework for developers and streamline technical reviews for city staff, which will support Ottawa’s housing and development objectives.”

AI PreCheck is already supporting digital permitting initiatives across 30-plus cities and government agencies in North America and Australia, including Surrey, Burnaby, Burlington, Austin, and Los Angeles.

For Ottawa, the pilot represents more than a technology evaluation. It’s part of a broader shift toward a more scalable, transparent, and applicant-friendly permitting process, one designed to help planners spend less time on avoidable rework and more time on the planning decisions that shape the city’s future.