Unlocking the potential of AI in statutory planning for Victorian councils

Between January and June 2025, Portable partnered with MAVLab and the City of Greater Dandenong to explore how artificial intelligence could be responsibly integrated into statutory planning across Victorian councils. 

We engaged 70% of the state’s councils, more than 250 professionals, 18 technology vendors, and a range of sector experts. It resulted in a landmark insights report, a council-informed AI use case library, a practical vendor pre-qualification framework, and a first-of-its-kind AI procurement guideline for local government. 

Together, these outputs offer a pathway for enabling a more efficient, ethical and scalable statutory  planning process at a time of housing pressure and system reform.

Councils are facing mounting pressures; housing demand, staffing shortages, regulatory reform, and growing expectations for faster, more transparent decisions. At the same time, AI is increasingly seen as a tool to help reduce administrative burden, but without a clear understanding of where it fits, what’s safe, or how to implement it responsibly and ethically.

Many councils are eager to explore AI but face real barriers in terms of readiness and have limited governance frameworks for AI adoption and implementation in place. And there was no shared language or toolset to help councils identify use cases that balanced impact with acceptable risk.

MAVLab recognised the need for a sector-wide response that could bring councils together to co-create a common framework for AI adoption, grounded in real planning needs and built on a foundation of professional judgment, public trust and legal integrity.

Through deep consultation and co-design, we delivered a landmark insights report, a council-informed AI Use Case Library and a flexible procurement framework to support a pre-qualified vendor register for reviewing AI and automation tools. 

Together, these outputs form a practical, scalable roadmap for responsible AI adoption, one that supports local government to innovate with care, transparency and integrity.

In this project, we leveraged our in-house AI strategy frameworks to help councils distinguish between the hyped up promises and confusion about what AI can do, and real value for councils. We mapped opportunities for AI against actual council planning pain points, assessed the maturity of vendor offerings, and embedded responsible AI principles throughout the procurement and supporting materials we created.

A cornerstone of the project was understanding the sector’s baseline. We designed and distributed an AI Readiness Survey to all 79 councils in Victoria, focusing not just on planning-specific tools but on overall organisational preparedness for AI use and adoption. This included questions about governance structures, current AI usage, policy maturity, and planned investments. The data helped us identify patterns of capability and constraint, which informed the development of scalable use cases and the role procurement can play in assisting the match between vendors and use cases. 

This systems-informed lens was also critical to our engagement design. We didn’t just engage council planning teams, we brought together procurement officers, risk leads, IT specialists, and legal advisers in both mixed and domain-specific sessions. The result was a nuanced map of cross-functional dependencies that shape real-world AI adoption.

Our approach to procurement centred on demystifying what “good” looks like when buying AI applications and tools Councils and vendors told us that existing procurement models were either overly rigid or too vague to handle the specific risks and opportunities that AI introduces. We tested early prototypes of the framework with both council procurement teams and 18 AI technology vendors to collect feedback on how our guidance aligned with their business models, service offerings, and go-to-market challenges. Portable developed a flexible “compliance by go-live” model, recognising that few AI vendors were ready to have compliance to new AI governance standards today, but are on a path towards this and need the investment to do so. This framework gives councils the assurance they needed while allowing vendors to iterate responsibly. We also introduced tiered assessment criteria based on risk, use case criticality, and vendor maturity, aligning legal, ethical and technical readiness into a single evaluative frame.

We approached this work as a systems-level intervention; bringing together planning, technology, procurement, governance, and ethics into a shared conversation about what responsible AI adoption should look like in the Victorian local government context. 

1. Discovery: We mapped current planning and procurement workflows, surveyed all Victorian councils, and conducted 21 expert interviews across planning, law, First Nations , AI ethics, and systems innovation.
2. Design: We ran three co-design workshops with 58 councils (structured by jurisdiction type) to prototype practical use cases and refine draft procurement tools. A roundtable with 18 vendors helped us test these tools for feasibility and fairness in real-world procurement scenarios.
3. Delivery: We synthesised our insights into a comprehensive sector-wide report, a curated and tested AI Use Case Library, and a set of practical procurement tools, including a flexible pre-qualification framework to set up the Register of vetted vendors, and scenario-ready procurement guidance for both councils and vendors.

Throughout, we prioritised practical application and portability of insights. Our outputs were designed to be directly implementable by councils at different stages of digital transformation, and extensible across other domains where AI may play a future role.

One of the most significant outcomes of this project was the strategic roadmap for integrating AI in statutory planning, delivered through a final report that carefully balanced the perspectives of councils, technology vendors, planners, procurement teams, and community values.

We worked alongside councils to understand their AI maturity levels, technology readiness, and pain points in planning, from overwhelming administrative workloads to inconsistent interpretation of schemes. We mapped the current capabilities of AI against what planning really needs: transparency, explainability, and human judgment.

Importantly, we didn’t just ask “what can AI do?”. We asked “what should it do?” Our analysis explored the ethical, legal, cultural and operational risks of AI in planning, and identified areas where automation could support, rather than undermine, human expertise.

The final report is more than a research document. It’s a shared blueprint for councils across Australia and internationally to approach AI adoption in ways that are cautious, future-focused, and grounded in the strengths of the planning profession. It helps the sector move forward together, not by pushing automation for its own sake, but by elevating the decision-making, communication and impact of planners themselves .

Unlike traditional council services where procurement panels are typically built around clearly defined, repeatable tasks like waste collection or road maintenance, the integration of AI into statutory planning demanded a different approach. Many of the most valuable AI use cases, such as intelligent document review or automated triage, are not yet fully standardised and involve emerging technology, variable data conditions, and legal or ethical complexity.

At the outset of the project, MAV's procurement frameworks weren’t set up to manage this ambiguity. There was no precedent for establishing a vendor panel that could balance flexibility with rigour: assessing suppliers not just on functionality, but on their roadmap to compliance, their commitment to human oversight, their handling of culturally sensitive data, and their ability to integrate with diverse council systems.

For MAV’s procurement team, the challenge was not a lack of rigour, it was a lack of precedent. Traditional procurement panels are typically set up for well-scoped services like roadworks or waste collection. But AI in planning presented a different landscape entirely. Use cases for AI in planning tended to be complex, emergent, and often hard to pin down in advance. At the start of the project, there was no clear way to confidently assess or endorse vendors who could operate safely, ethically, and effectively across such a broad and dynamic space. The risk wasn’t just choosing the wrong solution but also inadvertently setting the wrong expectations across all 79 Victorian councils.

Together, Portable and MAV worked to reframe this problem. Through design-led consultation, we supported MAV in shifting from a traditional vendor procurement panel to a pre-qualified AI vendor Register: a curated group of vendors whose solutions had been assessed not just on functionality, but on principles like transparency, integration capability, cultural data sovereignty, and commitment to human-in-the-loop design.

To support this transition, we co-developed plain-language tools and checklists to help councils ask the right questions, even if they didn’t have AI expertise. We also surfaced the importance of flexible procurement pathways, allowing vendors to demonstrate “compliance by go-live” for evolving features, rather than fail-fast assessments based on incomplete requirements.

The MAV AI in Planning initiative represents a pioneering effort in integrating artificial intelligence into local government statutory planning. By developing a report on the central needs and opportunities faced by Councils, the strengths and limitations of AI to work within the current regulatory systems, and a comprehensive AI Use Case Library the report and procurement framework provide councils with practical tools to navigate the complexities of AI adoption responsibly.

MAV is now preparing to establish a pre-qualified Register of AI vendors currently active in the market. Combined with the procurement guidelines developed through this project, this will provide councils with a robust foundation for beginning their AI adoption journey.

The foundational work of this project has also revealed a set of priority action items that MAV and MAVlab are now positioned to address. The research has provided valuable insights into the ongoing support councils will need, including training and capability development programs, clear implementation pathways, focused AI response groups, and frameworks for measuring impact and evaluating outcomes to inform future iterations.

While the specific scope and timeline of these initiatives will depend on various factors including funding and resource allocation, the project has established a clear understanding of the types of support that will be most valuable as councils begin adopting AI solutions. MAV is taking steps toward actioning these priorities to ensure councils have the guidance and resources needed throughout their AI implementation journey.Portable continues to share the learnings and frameworks from this work as an example of responsible AI integration at sector scale.

“Portable’s approach stood out from the very beginning. Their proposal prioritised expert engagement from the outset, allowing them to hit the ground running with focused, high-impact work. Their ability to navigate complex content, especially around governance and procurement, resulted in clear, accessible outputs that reflected the voice and needs of councils across Victoria. Portable remained flexible and solutions-focused throughout the process, adapting to shifting timelines while keeping quality and collaboration front and centre.”

— Sahar Farzanfar, Program Lead, MAVLab

“This project was a rare chance to work across an entire system, from Planners in councils to AI and procurement specialists, to shape how AI can be safely and meaningfully integrated into local government. We were able to pair deep engagement with technical rigour, building an AI use case library and procurement framework grounded in real-world complexity, current state AI capabilities, and robust governance needs. The openness of MAV and their partners made it possible to design something scalable and ethical. The resulting insights in the report feel valuable not just for councils in Victoria, but anywhere grappling with emerging tech in public systems.”

— Sarah Kaur, Human-centred AI Lead, Portable

• Sarah Kaur, Human-centred AI Lead
• Alice Reeve, Senior Producer
• Willhemina Wahlin, Senior Design Strategist, Visual Designer