Planning By Design’s Director Grant Ward reveals how a practical, people-first approach to AI is transforming operations and why most businesses are still getting it wrong.
At a time when the evidence of AI failure is mounting, one UK-based planning consultancy is delivering the kind of results most businesses are still chasing. Planning By Design, led by Grant Ward, has deployed artificial intelligence across its customer engagement, project management, sales processes, administrative workflows and content production, and says the returns have been clear for some time.
The Problem: Businesses Are Spending Big and Getting Little Back
The scale of AI underperformance is difficult to overstate. According to RAND Corporation’s 2024 research, more than 80% of AI projects fail to reach meaningful production, precisely double the failure rate of traditional IT projects. S&P Global Market Intelligence’s 2025 survey found that 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives last year, a sharp rise from just 17% in 2024. BCG’s ‘Where’s the value in AI’ report found that 74% of businesses are generating no tangible value from AI despite collectively spending $252billion on it.
The reasons are well-documented: misaligned business objectives, poor data governance, a lack of human oversight, and a tendency to chase the technology rather than solve a real problem.
“Most businesses approach AI the wrong way. They invest in the technology first and try to find a use for it afterwards. We started with our problems and worked backwards to find where AI could genuinely help. That distinction is everything.” — Grant Ward, Director, Planning By Design
The Planning By Design Approach: Practical, Purposeful, People-First
Where other organisations have gambled on AI as a headline investment, Planning By Design has treated it as an operational discipline. The firm identified specific pain points across its workflows, the kind of repetitive, time-consuming tasks that drain skilled professionals and built AI solutions to address each one directly.
Central to the strategy is Aisa, Planning By Design’s custom AI assistant. On the front end, Aisa supports customers through the company website, answering general planning and design questions, guiding people through the early stages of their enquiry and helping them book a planning appraisal with one of the firm’s chartered town planners where appropriate. She is also able to send invoices and payment links when customers are ready to proceed, while still recognising when a human conversation is the better option and flagging those cases back to the team.
But the real impact of AI at Planning By Design extends far beyond the website chatbot. Behind the scenes, AI is now embedded into many of the repetitive, time-consuming processes that previously relied on manual input. That includes checking project milestones each day, identifying what is due or overdue, helping staff filter and prioritise projects, and generating reports that give managers a clearer view of workflow, delays and team capacity. Tasks that once consumed significant administrative time are now handled more quickly and more consistently.
AI is also helping streamline the firm’s sales and customer service processes. Planning appraisal invoices, once a manual multi-step task, can now be prepared and sent far more quickly. Feasibility reports and quotes, which previously required information to be transferred between systems and checked manually, can now be assembled with AI support using the company’s internal pricing logic and workflow rules. According to Planning By Design, this has not only saved time, but also improved consistency, reduced the risk of missed details and helped create a smoother customer journey from enquiry through to instruction.
Another major benefit has come from AI’s ability to handle administrative work that, while essential, does not make the best use of skilled professionals’ time. Emails are checked and saved against CRM records, design briefs can be processed and filed automatically, project tracker updates can be requested through AI with human oversight where needed, and client drawings and documents can be sent, logged and stored in the correct places without the same level of manual handling previously required. For a fast-growing business managing a large number of live projects, those efficiencies add up quickly.
Planning By Design has also invested in a client portal that brings many of these processes together. Clients can log in securely to view project progress in real time, access key documents, and see a clear timeline of activity. AI plays an important role here too, helping to organise files, update statuses and make project information easier for clients to access. The company says this has reduced the volume of routine update calls while giving customers greater transparency and reassurance.
In simple terms, Planning By Design has used AI to remove friction across the entire lifecycle of a project from first enquiry to final delivery improving speed, consistency and visibility at every stage.
Scale That Would Have Been Impossible Before
AI has also transformed Planning By Design’s content operation. Using generative AI with full human editorial oversight, the team has produced 133 blog articles and 143 videos over two years, output that Ward says would have required significantly more resources to achieve through traditional means.
Ward added: “AI has never replaced a single member of our team. What it has done is give talented professionals better tools, freed them from repetitive administration, and given them more time to spend on the work that genuinely needs human expertise, judgment, and communication.”
Why It Worked: The Five Principles Behind the Results
Grant Ward identifies five clear reasons why Planning By Design’s AI investment has succeeded where so many others have failed:
- Problem-first, not technology-first. Every AI application was built to solve a specific, documented operational problem, not to deploy AI for its own sake.
- Human oversight is non-negotiable. No AI output reaches a client without human review. The technology augments professional judgment; it does not replace it.
- Start with repetitive tasks. The highest-value applications have been in administrative and operational tasks that consume skilled professionals’ time without requiring their expertise.
- Integrate deeply, not superficially. AI is embedded into the firm’s actual CRM, project tracker, document systems, and client-facing portal, not bolted on as a separate tool.
- Measure actual outputs. Success is measured in hours saved, errors reduced, response times improved, and client satisfaction, not vanity metrics.
To learn more about how Planning By Design is applying AI in a practical, results-driven way, read the full article here:
About Planning By Design
Planning By Design is a young, fast-growing UK planning and architectural design consultancy that has quickly built a reputation for innovation, client service and results. Founded in 2021, the business has already won eight industry awards, secured more than 930 planning approvals, and earned over 625 client reviews across Google, Trustpilot and Facebook. With a substantial portfolio of residential and commercial work, Planning By Design is helping modernise the planning and design experience through a combination of expert human advice, strong systems and smart use of technology.
