NAAMII and Conflation Labs Partner to Advance AI for Engineering Drawings and Site Plan Review

NAAMII has entered into a research partnership with Conflation Labs, an AI company building tools for zoning and permitting workflows, to advance computer vision for engineering drawings and site plans.

Engineering drawings are among the most information-dense documents used in construction and permitting. Their complex technical, spatial, and visual information remains difficult for current AI systems to interpret reliably, making automated plan review a challenging open problem.

Through this collaboration, NAAMII and Conflation Labs will work toward developing more capable computer vision methods and rigorous benchmarks for real-world plan sets, with evaluation grounded in actual permitting workflows.

Bringing Research and Real-World Workflows Together

Conflation Labs brings expertise in AI-powered zoning and permitting workflows, along with access to real municipal use cases and production environments. NAAMII contributes research expertise in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and scientific benchmarking.

The research effort is being led at NAAMII by Dr. Danda Pani Paudel, Adjunct Research Scientist and Principal Investigator leading PUSHVIC at NAAMII.

The partnership will focus on three key areas:

• Advancing computer vision methods for interpreting complex engineering drawings and site plans
• Developing rigorous benchmarks using real-world plan sets
• Evaluating models in real permitting workflows to measure their performance under practical conditions

“Engineering drawings are among the most information-dense documents in any industry, and today’s AI models still struggle to read them reliably. This collaboration with Conflation Labs gives us what applied research needs most: real documents, real workflows, and a partner in production. Together, we aim to set a rigorous benchmark for the field and advance computer vision where it can have immediate practical impact.”

— Dr. Danda Pani Paudel, Adjunct Research Scientist and PI leading PUSHVIC at NAAMII

For Conflation Labs, the partnership strengthens the technical research behind its work to help local governments and the AEC industry answer development and zoning questions more efficiently.

“Municipal plan review still depends on too much manual interpretation of complex drawings, which slows teams down and creates inconsistency. This partnership with NAAMII helps us push the frontier on computer vision for the kinds of documents that matter in real permitting workflows.”

— Shital Dhakal, CEO and Co-Founder of Conflation Labs

By combining research expertise with real-world data, workflows, and deployment experience, the partnership aims to advance computer vision for one of the most challenging document understanding problems in the built environment.

About Conflation Labs

Conflation Labs builds AI-powered assistants for zoning, permitting, and development workflows. Its products help turn complex regulations and plan documents into clearer, faster answers for local government staff, residents, and developers.

Learn more at conflationlabs.com