What If Planners Had More Time?

When administrative work is handled by AI, planning professionals face a deceptively complex question: what do they choose to do next?

The Hours Hidden in Plain Sight

A planner in a busy private consultancy can spend a significant portion of their working day on tasks that have nothing to do with planning judgement: checking submission checklists against each local authority's individual requirements, cross-referencing policy references to make sure they haven't been superseded, hunting through a shared drive for the correct version of a drawing. These tasks are not trivial. A single omission on a submission checklist can invalidate an application before it is even assessed, but they are also not what planners spent years in education to do.

Ireland's planning system processes more than 33,000 applications annually within an increasingly complex legislative and policy framework. Refusal rates have doubled over the last decade. Yet the underlying workflow of research, compliance, document assembly, validation, etc., etc., remains largely manual. The time cost is real and it accumulates quietly, project by project.

AI tools purpose-built for planning work, such as EirePlan, are beginning to automate these structural and administrative elements: verifying policy against current legislation at the date of submission, generating site-specific pre-submission checklists that replicate how a planning authority reviews incoming applications, and maintaining a versioned document workspace with a full audit trail. The promise is straightforward: hours returned to the professional each week.

But this raises a question that is less straightforward: what does a planner actually do with that time?

"Generative AI gave people the ability to do more of what they want to do and less of what they have to." — MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

What the Research Shows

The question of how professionals use time recovered through AI has attracted serious attention from researchers, and the emerging picture is more varied and more cautionary than the promotional story typically told about workplace AI.

The Time Savings Are Real

A 2024 survey by the Adecco Group covering more than 35,000 workers across 27 countries found that AI tools save workers an average of one hour per day. Those figures are consistent across sectors: workers in energy and clean technology reported savings of 75 minutes a day; those in financial services, 57 minutes. Research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in early 2025 found that workers who use generative AI save approximately 5.4% of their working hours. That's around 2.2 hours per week for someone working full time.

For planning professionals, where much of the repetitive workload is document-heavy and research-intensive, the potential savings are likely at the higher end. Anthropic's own analysis of AI-assisted tasks found that compiling information from reports saw time savings of approximately 95%, while document drafting of reports, memos, and statements saw savings of around 87%.

Sources: Adecco Group Global Workforce Report 2024; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 'The Impact of Generative AI on Work Productivity', February 2025; Anthropic Economic Index, 'Estimating Productivity Gains', 2024.

What People Actually Did With the Extra Time

The Adecco research found that workers split broadly into three camps. Around 28% directed their extra time toward more creative work; 26% used it for strategic thinking; and 27% said it helped them achieve a better work-life balance. However, 23% reported simply tackling the same workload at the same pace, and 21% spent more of their recovered time on personal activities during the working day.

A 2025 survey by Indeed's Hiring Lab, drawing on responses from more than 80,000 workers across eight countries including Ireland, found that workers most commonly used saved time to take on additional tasks and projects, or to improve the quality of their existing work. About a third of US respondents said they redirected time toward work-life balance improvements; nearly a quarter said they used it for breaks and stress management.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review in March 2025 offered a more sober view: that time freed by AI does not automatically flow toward high-value work. Without deliberate intention, and without managerial or organisational structures that actively redirect it, recovered hours can dissipate into low-value activity or simple downtime. As one analysis summarised the finding: the windfall can evaporate into idle tinkering, low-value busywork, or outright downtime.

A separate study tracking around 200 employees at a US technology company over eight months found that after adopting AI tools, workers moved faster, took on a wider range of tasks, and extended their work into more hours of the day, even without being asked to do so. The enthusiasm was real, but so were the consequences. Workloads quietly expanded to overwhelming levels, and cognitive fatigue and weaker decision-making followed. The tool delivered efficiency. The organisation had not thought through what efficiency was for.

Sources: Adecco Group Global Workforce Report 2024; Indeed Hiring Lab, December 2025; Harvard Business Review, 'How Is Your Team Spending the Time Saved by Gen AI?', March-April 2025; Inc., 'AI Promised to Save Time. Researchers Find It's Doing the Opposite', February 2026.

The Shift Toward What Professionals Actually Want to Do

The more optimistic strand of research points in a consistent direction: when AI handles structural and routine work, knowledge workers tend to migrate toward the parts of their role they find most meaningful. A study of software developers using GitHub's Copilot tool, conducted by researchers at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, found that developers given AI assistance did more core coding work and fewer non-coding tasks. In other words, they shifted toward the work they were actually trained for.

The study's lead researcher, Frank Nagle, put it simply: generative AI gave people the ability to do more of what they want to do and less of what they have to. There was a secondary finding worth noting for any collaborative profession: developers also spent less time conferring with peers, which raised questions about the value of the human interaction that routine collaboration enables. Efficiency, it turned out, had social costs as well as benefits.

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review / MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, 'Generative AI Changes How Employees Spend Their Time', March 2025.

Four Things Irish Planners Might Do With More Time

Irish planning professionals are not generic knowledge workers. They are graduates of professionally accredited programmes, typically a minimum of four years of higher education, increasingly five or more, trained in sustainable development, community engagement, environmental law, climate policy, urban design, and the social dimensions of place. The Irish Planning Institute describes the primary function of planning as envisioning sustainable futures for places and working in partnership with others to bring about change in meaningful and effective ways.

That is a substantial brief. What happens when the administrative weight is lifted, even partially?

1. Higher-Quality Professional Judgement

The most immediate use of recovered time is also the most obvious: applying more careful professional judgement to the work already on the desk. In a practice environment where planners are under pressure from volume, the temptation is to produce compliant applications rather than excellent ones. With time available for deeper review, revisiting the site context, reassessing design quality, stress-testing the policy argument, the standard of professional advice can rise.

This is not a small thing. The Irish planning system awards significant weight to professional opinion in assessments. Better-prepared applications are less likely to attract requests for further information, less likely to be refused, and less likely to generate appeals. The downstream benefits extend to clients and, ultimately, to the quality of built development.

Research from Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend analysis found that 85% of workers using AI tools said AI helped them focus on more important work, and 84% credited it with boosting their creativity. The most mature AI users, those who had integrated the tools deeply into their workflows, were viewed as more innovative by their colleagues and reported feeling more energised and motivated.

Source: Microsoft Work Trend Index 2025, cited in Speakwise Knowledge Worker Productivity Statistics 2026.

2. Richer Community and Stakeholder Engagement

Community engagement is formally required in Irish planning processes, but the quality of that engagement varies enormously. When it competes with the volume demands of application preparation, it is often reduced to its minimum statutory form: a notice posted, a meeting held, a response filed.

Planners trained in recent years have a sophisticated understanding of what meaningful community engagement looks like. They know the research on participatory planning, on the gap between consultation and genuine co-design, and on the long-term costs of development that does not carry community trust. The Irish Planning Awards have consistently recognised planning projects that go significantly beyond statutory requirements in their engagement work with communities, minority groups, and young people.

Time is the resource that separates minimum compliance from genuine engagement. A planner with hours freed from policy verification and document assembly can do more — attend more meetings, develop better-quality visual materials, take time to listen, and revise applications in response to what they hear. The American Planning Association's PAS Report 604 on AI in planning identified community engagement as precisely one of the areas where AI-recovered time was most likely to yield meaningful professional returns.

Sources: Irish Planning Institute, 2025 Irish Planning Awards shortlist; American Planning Association, PAS Report 604: Planning With Artificial Intelligence, 2023.

3. Investing in Climate and Sustainability Work

Ireland's planning system operates within an ambitious policy environment. The Climate Action Plan, the Housing for All Strategy, the EU Green Deal, and alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals together represent a profound shift in what planning is expected to deliver. TU Dublin's planning programme describes its graduates as joining a global transition; UCC's MPlan emphasises climate justice as one of planning's central contemporary questions.

The gap between what planning graduates are trained to engage with and what day-to-day practice often allows is real. Climate adaptation analysis, biodiversity assessment, sustainable mobility integration, and long-term resilience planning, all take time that is often consumed by the mechanics of application preparation.

The APA's report on AI in planning argued that climate change, income inequality, affordable housing, and other pressing issues require enhanced approaches based on evidence and meaningful public discourse, and that AI is yet another tool planners should be leveraging to enhance problem-solving. The tool, in other words, is most valuable when it frees the planner to engage with the substantive challenges of 21st-century planning rather than the administrative burdens of 20th-century process.

Sources: TU Dublin, BSc Spatial Planning and Environmental Management programme description; American Planning Association, 'AI in Planning: Why Now Is the Time', Planning Magazine, Winter 2022.

4. Growing the Practice

For principals and senior planners in private practice, time recovered from administration opens a more commercial possibility: capacity to take on more work, or to develop services that were previously unaffordable to offer. A practice that can process compliance and documentation more efficiently can serve more clients, respond to enquiries more quickly, and compete on quality rather than simply on available hours.

There is also a professional development dimension. Atlassian research found that mature AI users are 1.5 times more likely to reinvest recovered time into learning new skills. For a profession facing rapid change in planning law, digital tools, and the complexity of environmental and climate obligations, the ability to invest in continued learning rather than simply keeping up with workload has real long-term value.

The Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals survey, drawing on more than 2,200 professionals in law, tax, and related knowledge fields, found that 42% of respondents wanted to spend more time on engaging, creative work, and nearly 60% wanted their profession to focus more on work-life balance. The pattern of aspiration is consistent: when administrative burden lifts, professionals want to move toward the substantive, the human, and the meaningful.

Sources: Atlassian AI Collaboration research, 2025; Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report 2024, cited in Fortune, July 2024.

The Real Question Is Intentionality

The research is clear on one thing: time saved does not automatically become time well spent. The Harvard Business Review analysis, and the study of the technology company whose employees quietly worked longer rather than better, both point to the same conclusion. Recovered time is a resource. Like any resource, it requires deliberate allocation.

For planning practices and individual planners, this means thinking in advance about what the extra hours are for. Is it for a more thorough pre-submission review process? More time at public consultation meetings? A dedicated slot each week for professional development? A capacity to take on a category of work that was previously impractical?

The answer will differ by practice size, individual role, and the kinds of projects a practice works on. What matters is that the question is asked. AI tools like EirePlan are designed to handle the structural and administrative elements of application preparation — policy verification, pre-submission validation, document control, precedent research. That is a significant weight off a professional's working day.

What planners do with the weight removed is, in the end, a professional question, and a human one. In Ireland, planners were trained to envision sustainable futures. The question AI poses, obliquely but insistently, is whether the daily structure of practice has been leaving enough room to do that.

"The potential of AI lies in assisting with recurring data and analysis-intensive tasks — and helping the profession step back and identify opportunities for process improvement." — American Planning Association

References

Adecco Group (2024). Working through change: Adapting to an AI-driven world of work. Global Workforce Report.

American Planning Association (2022). AI in Planning: Why Now Is the Time. Planning Magazine, Winter 2022.

American Planning Association (2023). PAS Report 604: Planning With Artificial Intelligence.

American Planning Association (2025). Can AI Empower Planners to Accomplish More with Less? Planning Magazine, June 2025.

Anthropic (2024). Estimating Productivity Gains. Anthropic Economic Index.

Atlassian (2025). AI Can Help Knowledge Workers Fix These Five Frustrations. Harvard Business Review (sponsored content), April 2025.

Bick, A., Blandin, A., and Deming, D. (2025). The Impact of Generative AI on Work Productivity. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. February 2025.

Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley (2026). Cited in: Inc., AI Promised to Save Time. Researchers Find It's Doing the Opposite. February 2026.

Harvard Business Review (2025). How Is Your Team Spending the Time Saved by Gen AI? March–April 2025.

Harvard Business Review (2025). The Gen AI Playbook for Organizations. November–December 2025.

Indeed Hiring Lab / Aoki, Y. (2025). Workers Use Time Saved by AI to Improve Their Roles. December 2025.

Irish Planning Institute (2023). About Planning.

Irish Planning Institute (2025). 2025 Irish Planning Awards Shortlist.

Microsoft Research (2025). The Future of AI in Knowledge Work: Tools for Thought at CHI 2025. April 2025.

MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy / Nagle, F. et al. (2025). Generative AI Changes How Employees Spend Their Time. MIT Sloan Management Review, March 2025.

Thomson Reuters (2024). Future of Professionals Report. Cited in Fortune, July 2024.

TU Dublin (2025). BSc in Spatial Planning and Environmental Management (TU835).

University College Cork (2025). MPlan in Planning and Sustainable Development.