The county recently announced plans to expand its use of the SwiftGov platform developed by Orlando-based Swiftbuild.ai. While permitting may seem like a technical process best left to developers and their attorneys, Walton County planning director Stephen Schoen said that addressing efficiency in the planning department can have far-reaching effects on residents’ quality of life.

“We look forward to that opportunity to utilize the Al to do more of that project management side of things while we can use the human minds and intuition of our planners to do more of the long-range planning work that we all need out of our planners,” Schoen said.

For Swiftbuild, Walton County’s commitment marks the latest step in a rapid ascent that has seen the startup expand its work with existing clients and gaini new ones.

Growing Pains

Situated along the Gulf Coast in the Florida Panhandle, Walton County has seen its population grow by 26.9% since 2020, the 21st biggest percentage increase among counties nationally and third most in Florida during that period, according to World Population Review. That influx has produced unprecedented development, which has resulted in challenges for many areas that shape people’s quality of life, Schoen noted.

“All the things that are tied into that — infrastructure needs, transportation needs, recreation needs, all of those things that we’re mandated by the state to care for — are being strained,” he said.

The planning department has had to bear complaints at public meetings and beyond that. Schoen acknowledges that the local government had not done the kind of short-term or long-term planning needed to handle that growth, and it’s now dealing with the ramifications.

“I think our situation’s not necessarily unique,” he said. “There’s just a lot of growth in the state, so a lot of municipal governments experienced some of that, and some were more prepared than others. I will say that we were not.”

The department also has experienced a fair amount of internal turnover from retirements and staff members pursuing other opportunities, Schoen added.

“We lost this wealth of knowledge and just history in the department. So, that sort of exacerbated some of the struggles that we were facing from the external pressures,” he said.

SwiftGov caught planning leaders’ attention as a tool that could help automate permit reviews and other processes, Schoen said.

Building SwiftGov

Steering SwiftGov are Sabrina Dugan and John Mirkin. The two met at the University of Florida, where Dugan, who oversees technology and development, studied sustainability as an undergraduate, and Mirkin, who handles the legal and business sides, graduated from law school.

Dugan also worked for the UF Research Foundation, helping to develop several patents for automated land code review, and then she worked with another startup that was working on a similar tool but ceased operations, they said.

They started Swiftbuild.ai aiming to pick up on those efforts and to serve small-to-mid-sized local government entities struggling with permitting processes in the face of significant growth.

“We saw a fundamental disconnect,” Dugan said. “There’s enormous demands with housing, billions in investment ready to deploy, and the bottleneck isn’t financing and labor. It’s permitting.”

“Local governments are doing their best with limited staff and paper-based processes that haven’t changed in decades. So, we saw an opportunity to bring purpose-built AI to that problem,” she added.

They created SwiftGov as an AI compliance platform for governments. So far, they have also developed a public-facing precheck and due-diligence portal that applicants can use to get more immediate feedback and ensure their filings are complete.

SwiftGov is configured with the client’s local zoning and building regulations, then it deploys AI to check compliance in a number of areas. It reviews which zoning districts the project is in, checks to make sure it satisfies building codes and requirements for setbacks, height and other guidelines. For the city of Titusville, Florida, another client, SwiftGov is configured to check more than 250 regulatory items for engineering alone, the company said.

Mirkin compared SwiftGov’s impact on the permit review process to the breakthrough that came with the arrival of online document management platforms about 20 years ago.

“That was a breakthrough at that time, but this is just really a game changer, because not only do we have the document management, but it’s actually doing a significant amount [beyond that],” Mirkin said. “It’s like a first and second set of eyes on the plan.”

The time it takes for SwiftGov to conduct a review depends on the detail and amount of data in a particular application. For single-family homes or townhomes, which have been the focus of the work in Walton County so far, a review can be completed in as quickly as 30 seconds to a minute, Mirkin said.

Subdivisions can take 10 to 15 minutes, but that’s compared to a human worker needing days to do the same work, Mirkin and Schoen both said.

“It’s something we’ve kind of tinkered with in R&D, because what we found is you can review the plans faster, but really the most important thing for this use case is accuracy,” Mirkin noted. “It’s really an incredible time saver, especially for the more complex plans. When you have a high enough volume of the simpler plans, the time savings can add up as well.”

The company’s first use of SwiftGov came in Florida’s Hernando County, which was hit by multiple hurricanes in 2024. That resulted in a backlog of permits for single-family home rebuilds, which SwiftGov helped address, Mirkin said.

The company said it achieved a 93% improvement in review times, cutting average time for initial planning, zoning and landscape reviews for single-family homes from 30 days to 15 minutes — a figure that continues to improve with more use. The county also realized $1.5 million in direct annual savings, not counting the savings for property owners and builders on more drawn-out financing, equipment and labor costs.

Working with Walton

Swiftbuild and Walton County started their work together in May 2025. They aimed to start slowly, focusing on permit reviews for single-family homes and townhomes.

Schoen said he did not see major concerns raised about the implementation of AI, although he did mention some pockets of fear about AI taking over like in the “Terminator” movies, or that it might deliver inaccurate results, such as pulling in regulations from Georgia’s Walton County.

“It was just sort of an exercise in explaining that this AI isn’t ChatGPT, this isn’t something that’s connected to the World Wide Web and is going to do everything,” he said. “This is an AI that belongs to us that we’ve educated in our standards. That served to, I think, squash a lot of those initial fears on what sort of results we would get.”

He said that among attorneys he spoke with, there was widespread support based on an understanding that the benefits would likely outweigh concerns.

Schoen said staffers using SwiftGov work from a dashboard and decide which applications to upload to the platform for AI review while continuing to handle some manually. There are formatting standards that applications have to meet. The program is not able to handle all hand-drawn plans, for example.

Once SwiftGov provides its results, the staffers conduct a final check before responding to the customer.

SwiftGov has turned in strong results so far for Walton County. With 844 residential units reviewed since implementation, the platform has achieved 100% accuracy on townhome reviews and 89% accuracy on single-family home applications, according to the company.

Additionally, Swiftbuild and local officials have found Walton County to be a fruitful location for SwiftGov’s ongoing development. The area has a variety of sensitive environments that have resulted in the establishment of different zoning designations, including coastal construction control lines, white sands protection, wetlands, flood zones and dune lakes preservation areas.

“It’s a very attractive area to build just because it’s such a nice area, but there’s also some of the hardest to permit locations because of the environmental sensitivity,” Mirkin said.

They have loaded these different requirements into SwiftGov and been able to automate validation of some of those requirements, Mirkin and Schoen said.

One challenge, however, has been that some pieces of these reviews, particularly in the environmental sphere, are handled by other departments and reviewers, Schoen noted.

“So, while the AI review will turn out results in minutes for some of these applications, we are still being held up by somebody’s outside reviewers that look at these other, sensitive areas,” he said.

Schoen said the planning department has started working with other departments to introduce them to SwiftGov, and they have also looked into ways they might reduce some of those outside reviews and have government take a lighter touch, such as requiring affidavits from applicants attesting to compliance instead of conducting full reviews.

Next Steps

With the county’s commitment to move forward with SwiftGov, public officials and Swiftbuild are working to expand both the volume and the types of reviews, including for commercial properties and subdivisions.

They also plan to have more staff members start using the SwiftGov dashboard and to deploy SwiftGov’s public-facing tools, including the precheck portal and a chatbot, which they hope will be able to handle applicant questions.

The company and county also plan to look at ways to capitalize on the data insights being gathered from their engagement to help improve communication and track work history within the department.

“Some planners may have investigated a particular piece of property that bears a lot of questions and concerns. Somebody else [on staff] may not have that knowledge base, but with SwiftGov and some of these background features that we’re going to start working with, it’ll help our staff know the issues and know the answers that they should be giving when someone’s already done that work,” Schoen said.

Dugan also noted that SwiftGov’s implementation has uncovered inconsistencies in the county codes, so Swiftbuild is working with county staff to use the data to identify and address those issues to help modernize the standards.

“Anytime something gets flagged, we’re going to track how many times that comes up. And then we look at, well, is this because there’s actually ambiguity in the code or what’s causing this issue to come up so often, and then that helps inform areas that need to be changed and improved,” Mirkin said. He added that his legal background has come in helpful in this area, including helping to ensure any changes are made in compliance with state law.

Improving the consistency of permit reviews and eliminating any biases also could help reduce litigation in this area, Mirkin suggested.

“A lot of lawsuits stem from someone will get a permit denied and someone else will have the same application approved. So, there are sometimes accusations of preferential treatment and things like that,” he said. “But with the AI, it’s going to be uniform.”

Schoen emphasized that this is a work in progress and said that while he is already seeing advances and expects more, SwiftGov will remain a tool for the human planners, not a replacement.

“It was always considered just a human-centric tool, one that can assist us with timing and some of the technical stuff, so we could spend more time building the relationships in the community and understanding the issues that that will allow us to build upon the foundation of the comprehensive plan and do the real planning work, not just the project management work,” he said.

SwiftGov’s Future

Hernando County, which still ranks as Swiftbuild’s flagship client, recently renewed its contract for three years. They plan to tackle utilities, engineering and other review types there, Mirkin said.

The city of Titusville, on Florida’s Space Coast, also recently renewed its contract, and in September, Swiftbuild started a partnership with the city of Jacksonville.

That marks the company’s first big-city client, and it represents a potentially big step forward, as Jacksonville is the largest city by land area in the contiguous United States, with more than 840 square miles. It’s also ranked as the nation’s 10th-largest city by population at just over 1 million people in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“We’ve really enjoy working with them,” Mirkin said. “We’re working on some really complex, in-depth reviews of subdivisions and starting on some commercial projects there, internally. And it’s been going quite well.”

Swiftbuild has partnered with engineering firm CDM Smith for its Jacksonville engagement, Mirkin said. The new and expanded contracts have also prompted the company to grow its own staff.

Mirkin and Dugan said they have also drawn interest from other potential new partners, including from across the country, but they are cognizant of the need to maintain the quality of their performance.

“The most important thing is quality and strong results and [return on investment] for our partners,” Mirkin said. “We’ve had jurisdictions reach out, and so we are planning to grow, but we want to do that responsibly and to make sure that quality and outcomes are the top priority.”