A Continued Push: Digitalization & Environmental Permitting

By Luke Carothers

In many ways, the recent push towards AI-enabled products is part of an even longer push towards digitization throughout the AEC industry.  While many parts of the AEC industry are leading the way with AI and digital technologies, others have been slower to adopt. The Environmental Regulatory industry is one area that was initially slow to begin the digital transition, but in recent years has warmed up to digitizing its processes.  One of the firms supporting the AEC industry’s  charge towards efficiency and transparency is Ecobot, which launched in 2018 as one of the first digital solutions for environmental permitting. Ecobot quickly established a strong track record of reliability—both as a secure software and as a robust and accurate tool that supports the regulated community in advancing critical infrastructure projects more swiftly, and enabling large-scale environmental data management beyond the permit. 

In over a half a decade of operation, Ecobot has never had a report rejected by a regulator for an error—in fact, environmental consultants have generated nearly 170,000 regulatory reports using the software.  As the environmental industry looks to get further faster and mitigate the effects of climate change, Ecobot and other environmental tech companies are poised to  offer immediate efficiency and transparency across an increasingly distributed workforce.  

Lee Lance, Co-Founder and CEO of Ecobot, believes the transformative promise of AI has made modernization a mandate.  The growth of AI has increased the demand for digital tools across the industry, and from top to bottom—from the corporate level to the individual user.  Ecobot has witnessed a trend that has swept the software industry: that the way we find and consume software has shifted towards the enablement of end users. “Consumers are inclined to identify solutions on their own,” said Lance, “With the goal of making their jobs easier and more effective. They adopt what’s accessible to them. And when there’s a groundswell of interest, companies will standardize and benefit from increased efficiency, transparency, and data normalization.”  

On a higher level, large corporations and government agencies are incentivized to adopt and deploy digital tools with a focus on enhancing efficiency and enabling climate resilient design for infrastructure projects.  Lance points out several initiatives and pieces of legislation from the federal government—such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—that establish a connection between better infrastructure and answering the climate crisis, as well as recognizing the need to digitize data.  “The digitization of data, particularly within environmental permitting and data processing, is a key opportunity to speed infrastructure projects, build assets that are climate-resilient, and leverage environmental data long-term and at scale,” says Lance.

To this end, several states have already adopted digitized permitting processes that have resulted in significant improvements to efficiency and transparency in permitting.  For example, in 2023, Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) launched the Permit Enhancement and Evaluation Program (PEEP), which improved upon their previous systems by  streamlining the permitting process, shortening project timelines and boosting public transparency within that project. 

Lance also points out recent dramatic changes to federal environmental regulations, adding the need for “the regulated community [to remain] agile amid the changes.”  As these changes occur, the task of the environmental consultant remains the same: to assess land use risk and opportunity for their client.  Lance adds that, “the need to equip clients with thorough and sound data is more important than ever.”  

While there has been significant progress in recent years, Lance still believes the industry is “teetering on the edge of a digital boom.”  As funding from the IIJA and IRA begins to flow, Lance links a tangible connection between Ecobot’s value to customers working on large infrastructure projects and the ability to perform work with efficiency and reliability.  By eliminating time spent generating regulatory reports by up to 50 percent with built-in automations, Ecobot’s customers are able to streamline workflows and ensure seamless data transmission.  These capabilities have had major impacts on large infrastructure projects.  One example is Ecobot’s impact on infrastructure firm Burns & McDonnell’s management of Georgia Power’s Grid Investment Program, the multi-year plan to enhance approximately 1,700 miles of transmission lines across the state. The firm used Ecobot to conduct environmental assessments with a goal of avoiding sites where there would be environmental impacts. With Ecobot, the Burns & McDonnell team was able to quickly identify those areas and plan sites accordingly, keeping the project moving smoothly forward.

Thus far, Ecobot has been deployed by environmental consultants working on linear corridors and on parcels ranging in size from small developments to those that are thousands of acres, such as industrial and utility-scale power generation, transportation improvements and construction, solar developments, multi-state-pipeline projects, environmental restoration projects, and even a spaceport.  And, despite what Lance describes as the “environmental industry’s historic slowness to adopt technology,” he also points out the tremendous opportunity in not having old technology to replace, which enables the industry  to “jump right in and adopt significantly more impactful new technology.”  This drive towards delivering efficiency to customers is fueled by the use of data and AI.  Lance notes the extreme amount of rework involved throughout data collection and permitting, particularly when conducting multiple assessments where data may overlap.  “There is a significant opportunity for Ecobot to cut out that rework, and then expand and leverage data to create more strategic and creative value for customers and their clients.,” says Lance.

The opportunity extends beyond efficiency on individual projects. Data collected during environmental permitting at scale can be leveraged to track biodiversity, landform, surface, and subsurface soil data nationwide. In anonymized and aggregated form, the data could be used to close the data gap that currently prevents AI models from predicting biodiversity trends.   “Ecobot is positioned to close that gap with the data that is currently an underutilized byproduct of permitting by using it in aggregated, anonymized form,” says Lance. “Can you imagine what can be learned from that at a national or planetary scale?”