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*Winner - Best Tech Podcast - 2025 Quill Podcast Awards*
British Columbia is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis. While addressing various aspects of the housing supply chain is essential, no single approach can fully solve the challenges we face in scaling housing production. So, what's the blueprint for growth?
In November 2023, DIGITAL — Canada's Global Innovation Cluster for digital technologies — launched its Housing Growth Innovation Program with support from the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs. The program brings together collaborative teams of industry leaders to accelerate technology-driven approaches that are driving real, tangible growth for British Columbia's housing production sector.
Amy Vilis, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at DIGITAL, chats with innovators doing groundbreaking work within DIGITAL's Housing Growth Innovation Program to develop and implement technology-based solutions within British Columbia's housing sector across the full scale of end-to-end production. These conversations showcase how ideas are making it into the real world where they can become comprehensive, viable and, best of all, achievable solutions to accelerate housing production for British Columbians.
Amy Villis (00:01.612)
Innovation in housing doesn't stop at how we design or build. It has to reach the system that decides how homes actually get approved and delivered. Welcome to Blueprint for Growth Innovation in Housing. I'm your host, Amy Villas, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at Digital, Canada's global innovation cluster for digital technologies. In this episode, we dig into how cities and tech leaders are bringing housing delivery into the digital age.
Really, we can't create a system and process that works for housing. If we can create a really smooth process that everybody works towards, we start to get the integrated system and process that helps us move together rather than apart, which is happening at the moment in the way we think. Rene Craviotto, who leads the City of Vancouver's digital transformation program, shares how the city is moving from paper-based permitting to standardized automated workflows and what that shift really looks like on the ground.
Amy Villis (00:58.934)
Zane Franzen, VP of Platform and Operations at Simply Ask AI brings a private sector perspective, showing how better data, AI and connected systems can help make approvals faster, more transparent and predictable. Because real progress in housing isn't just about new tech, it's about collaboration, shared standards and making sure innovation actually leads to more affordable, accessible homes for Canadians.
Let's dig into what it really takes to achieve meaningful change inside of one of Canada's largest cities. My first guest, Rene Craviotto, has spent the last eight years with the City of Vancouver, most recently leading the Digital Transformation Program, a team that brings together technical experts, policy leaders to redesign how permitting and licensing works. By blending IT, business and frontline insights, Rene's team has become a kind of innovation lab within the city, relentlessly focused on analyzing pain points and delivering smarter, and more responsive services. BC's roadmap imagines a connected digital first housing system. Vancouver has been testing the ground on this for little while now on the digital perming and automation. You we can talk about the twofold, the challenges and the wins. On the challenges side, what have you seen in your experience so far?
Rene Craviotto
Some of the main challenges are a lot of times there are a lot of assumptions that go into us having absolutely everything ready to be digitized, ready to be machine executed. And it's the reality is that it isn't. We have a lot of collective understanding. have different sources of truth for different types of rules. We have these teams that have this collective experience and every Permit application needs to travel across multiple teams. So it's not, you're not dealing with a single team when you submit an application. You're dealing with dozens of teams that review your project from so many different angles and aspects. That's one of the challenges. It's the complexity that comes with it. Just that fact. Then externally, sometimes you have technology that seems to be ready, but you're trying to change an industry. You're trying to change how the industry works and how the different people coming up with these designs, how they use the tools, how they use the technology, how they prep their drawings to be submitted to the city.
And changing that is hard. it's nobody embraces change easily. When you have a change like that done by a single municipality, it's a different change for industry to quickly jump on board because when they have customers and when they're building and designing, they're doing that so for a whole area, right? It's not just Vancouver, it's the Metro Vancouver area. They have projects in Vancouver, they chances are they have projects in Burnaby or Surrey or North Vancouver, et cetera. It's difficult to try to lead the change and convince people to easily come along with that, especially if you're adding a little bit of friction to that change that you're asking them to do.
Amy Villis
I totally get it and I love what you're stating because it's taking the whole ecosystem and understanding the elements of it which instead of jumping in and to my next question which is around the technologies those quote-unquote silver bullets that we get pitched around something that could change how we permit review compliance all of those sorts of things to create a faster system. So how are you looking at technology and trying to avoid silver bullets.
Rene Craviotto (04:39.074)
So I think we look at technology as a second step. The first step that we're looking at is how do you standardize and how do you identify the different stages that you can apply technology to? To what extent are you able to move the needle and mature those different stages? Let me give you an example. You have the review process and the review process takes place once it's inside of the city of Vancouver, once it's with some of our teams. But we recognize that having or accepting a high quality application has a huge impact on the review times and the number of back and forths between the applicant and staff. So we've done a lot of effort to understand how technology can improve everything that leads all the way to the application stage, which includes exploration. Before you commit, before you hire somebody to do some design and to do some work on a particular site. You explore, what can I build? How much is it gonna cost? How long is it gonna take? What is required? So that's the exploration stage. Once you feel comfortable with the cost, with the timeline, with the effort, then you commit and you say, okay, let's hire this firm. And now you start designing your project. If better supported than current state, it yields a higher quality application. Those two areas have mostly been the work that our team has been focusing on.
Amy Villis
I love that. Of all of everything that you've just said, as far as understanding what someone can do on a lot and how that is reviewed and designed for, the roots of those elements are all about the rules. So our regulatory environment rules, land use rules. The City of Vancouver has 650 PDFs of land use rules. And so looking at how we look at digitizing those rules is at the core of this. And we talk about the quite often around the data that we use in order to use technologies. How are you guys looking at that? Because I do know that future calls for those machine readable codes and automated checks, it sounds really easy, but like getting those rules digitized, how are you approaching that? And I think this is a very common question from other local governments.
Rene Craviotto
We worked with an external vendor and we said, how digitizable are these documents? We manually identified what exactly we wanted to take on as that initial scope. And when they took a stab at it, they came back and said, well, only 43 % of the rules that you gave to me are fully digitizable. And what they meant with that is there's a lot of discretionary language in many of our biolots and regulations.
It's understandable to a certain point because you cannot preemptively cover absolutely every use case that we will encounter over time. You have three scenarios related to rules and machine executable rules. One is a net new rule. So imagine today we had something that's a hundred percent net new. It doesn't exist. So you don't have to digitize anything. You can concurrently design it in natural language.
Make sure meets all the legal terminology, but then you can also ensure that you have machine executable counterpart of that natural language or human readable side of things. That will be the easiest one. So the life cycle management of rules is key. It happens today in natural language, but when you're thinking of digitizing, you need to incorporate the life cycle management of a rule that has already been digital.
Amy Villis (08:29.437)
You know, I have to talk about the policy that bases on these rules a little bit. So you've got policy that is made, you know, sometimes the human factor comes in and decides something is a good idea. And what are the outcomes of that idea? Are we even sure that the policy that we are creating meets an outcome that we want to determine? How do we look at a bylaw? Do we know that we're basing this bylaw on data?
How and what approach are you guys taking to start looking at those policies actually being cemented in data in order to measure our outcomes to know if we need to modify them?
Rene Craviotto
That's a really interesting space you're bringing up. In this real estate and permitting space, in the exploration stage, you have this widget that allows people to understand whether they can cut a tree, whether they can go ahead with certain type of project. And if they realize that, no, I cannot cut down the tree, so they will never submit a tree cutting permit. And we will never be able to measure that, I don't know, six out of 10 tree cutting permit applications that we received were rejected, which could be a metric of, this policy is working. Look, it's protected six out of 10 trees, but maybe it's protecting even more, but we're just not capturing the information during the exploration stage. When people go online and they go through this widget and they answer a few questions and they can see the chances of me being allowed to cut the tree are slim, let's not even apply. Right. And that is, that is hard to do. So basically what we need to do is we need to start changing how we measure that outcome or the impact of those policies, other than just counting number of applications and potentially the outcome of whether approved or rejected. Right? So it's, it's almost like I'm trying to understand initial customer intent as opposed to just doing accounting on the volume of transactions by type.
Amy Villis (10:35.35)
Okay, so how can you illustrate digital workflows and how they've changed the roles of staff or stakeholders contributing within the city's processes?
Rene Craviotto
Many organizations and municipal governments. The workflow is human driven, people know who to send this request next. Once they're done with their stage, there's a lot of email communications. And sometimes there's a system of record that when you're the application status changes from one value to another value, then it automatically shows up in some other teams backlog or queue. And we're also facing more and more opportunities to incorporate stages in this workflow that are not just human driven, but that could be applying some machine executable logic. How do you weave both of those together into your digital workflow? So things that people do and things that machines or algorithms do for you. You need some modern tech stack to be able to do that and mature a lot how your systems talk to each other.
Amy Villis
I know we talk about AI, we talk about AI chat bots, you're talking about algorithms that can help make things machine and digitally enabled. So if you could talk a little bit about that, because I know other municipalities have incorporated these bots, what does it really mean and how is it really impacting, whether it's Vancouver or just the sector as a whole?
Rene Craviotto
I think AI as a group of technologies, again, it can be applied throughout the different stages. It could be applied at the exploration stage. You just mentioned chatbots. So some of these Q &A interactions with the city about, I do this? Can I build this? Those are perfectly supported by some of the newer chatbot technology, which are AI driven, right?
Rene Craviotto (12:35.692)
So there are multiple opportunities to apply AI throughout the different stages that I was mentioning. You have the exploration, apply, intake, and then the review stages. I think chatbots are really well suited for supporting the exploration stage. I think they're a really good upgrade from the previous generation chatbots. When it comes to other stages, AI can be applied in different stages. It can be applied to support staff, to make staff more efficient. It can be applied at the design stage where some people can leverage tools that incorporated AI to help them make fewer mistakes and potentially be able to submit a better quality application to the city for their particular project. And so you have all these different options and I think you need to find the right tool to solve the right problem. We've got some projects we're working with around generative design and its utility. My big thing is, what do think the future of is? Are we going to see local governments starting to accept 3D, 2D digital BIM files in order to expedite reviews, or are we going to be stuck in the world of flattening of PDFs? Younger people graduating from university, like their digital maturity is much higher and it's easier for them to, if they don't have it already, it's easier for them to quickly adopt.
Amy Villis (14:08.514)
What opportunities do you see for future streamlining and harmonizing of permitting in a regional or national level?
Rene Craviotto
I was going to say that it also requires that municipalities themselves transform how they process and take in those BIM enabled designs, right? We're not ready to do so. It's key that you build some integration and you bring that metadata from those tools into populating your forms and you need to prevent them from overriding. So if in your drawing you have four bedrooms and one den, you cannot say suddenly that you have five bedrooms.
It needs to come from the model or from the drawing that you submitted. And if the numbers don't add up and if there's some error in the design, then you need to go back to your design and then resubmit with the proper tagging or the proper identification of the different design elements on your drawing. The data needs to be trusted. If you don't trust the data, and in the case of a drawing, the data coming from the drawing, it's just numbers, it's part of your design. It's not user entry, no typos.
So one of the biggest things that we all do is we try to run before we can even walk. And one of the things out of the gate in our end-to-end understanding of how we can accept digital files, how we can do e-comply, how we could engage with our constituents from a local government's lens is. How do you verify someone is who they say they are and that they have the land right access to do what they're doing? you know, and as unsexy as it is, as far as logging in and verifying your credentials, how have you guys approached that that issue? Because it's a significant one to get the ball rolling on any digital first process.
Rene Craviotto (15:55.65)
I'm very passionate about that topic. We've been working for the last few years with different organizations. BC government, their digital trust team has been very supportive. For many of you that don't know about this mobile app, it's called the BC Wallet. The BC Wallet has a personal credential that allows the holder of such a credential to show digital proof of them being who they claim to be.
And when you do so by scanning this QR code in your applications with the municipality, it allows you to fill out the form with your full name, with your address, any of those attributes that would normally show up on your driver's license, basically. And the receiving municipality or organization immediately would know that this person is who they claim to be and not just using some names that they know are associated to a particular app.
And there's another thing we're doing is we're collaborating with LTSA, the Land, Tidal and Survey Authority of BC. They're going to be issuing a property owner credential early next year. And we've been collaborating into being the first ones to accept such a digital credential that will allow people to show proof digitally, real time, that they are a owner for a particular property that anyone would be trying to consume services for within the municipal government. So this is very exciting.
Amy Villis
If Canada could invest in one digital technology or innovation right now to truly accelerate housing delivery, what would it be and why does it stand out for you?
Rene Craviotto (17:40.546)
I think they should invest in digital regulations and in a platform that allows you to easily access machine executable regulations. Instead of having multiple organizations and layers of government and private sector to try to come up with their own individual solution to this problem, I think it's a great opportunity for build it once and then just share it and allow everybody to benefit from it.
Amy Villis
What is your call to action, whether it's government, industry or community who want to champion real change in adopting modern methods and technology in housing innovation?
Rene Craviotto
I think it's all about taking an ecosystems thinking approach. You can do a lot of POCs on your own and potentially try to develop an understanding of some problem yourself. But it is when you start collaborating with other teams within your organization, with other organizations, that you truly have an opportunity to affect change. A lot of the times, the solution to your problem is not within your scope. It's someone else's to implement. And that's where this collaboration allows me to contribute a solution to someone else and then leverage someone else's to fix my own issues.
Amy Villis
I agree. I agree.
Amy Villis (19:07.992)
We've heard how Vancouver is reimagining its permitting system from the inside out, but digital transformation isn't just a government story. The private sector is just as critical in shaping how these tools actually get built and used. Zane Franzen, VP of Platform and Operations at SimplyAskAI, brings his perspective. His Vancouver-based team is modernizing workflows across government, construction, and beyond, using AI, data automation, and digital tools to connect systems that have traditionally operated in silos.
Zane's work sits right at the intersection of policy and practice, helping us see what it really takes to bring new digital infrastructure to life, whether it's inside local governments or out on the job site. So with your work with Canadian local governments and other housing construction organizations, what are some of the lessons that have emerged about the persistent barriers that occur when you're talking about digital transformation in these spaces?
Zane Franzen
The number one key lesson that emerges quickly whenever an organization considers doing any type of digital transformation project is that you need good data. And not just like good quality and accurate data, of course, but digitized data that can be used for things like embedding AI and automation. It brings to mind when I was talking to Miesipalvy a few years ago, or two years ago now, and when we started our conversation, we started talking about how they handle a constituent and developer request about building codes and bylaws.
And they had a simple answer. They just pointed at a paper rack in their office and said, you know, pick out some brochures and booklets. And so, you know, when I tell this to other municipalities, I often get back from them that, yeah, we have something similar like that. And it's really just showing that you can think about AI and automation, but if you're pointing at paper racks, you're not quite there yet.
Amy Villis (20:56.748)
And what are the key recommendations you would make to some local governments around how they could start this process, where they should begin with?
Zane Franzen
Yeah, so there's definitely phases about how you can get ready to actually go about using your data for digital transformation. And there's kind of phases I like to break it down for. I mean, number one phase is data availability. So do even have it? Is it written down somewhere? Is it in some document, digital or physical? Or is it just in someone's head? So that's kind of the number one point you need to get over first. The next is digitization. Is it at least on paper? If it is, okay, we need to get that into some virtual format that we can actually start using. And for the third phase, I would say is data structure. So it's great if you have all the information, but there are some key principles, especially when you're talking about using AI that you need to follow around how things are written. So is it written such a way that there's a ton of cross references between, let's say, bylaws, or is all of the information needed to make a decision for that bylaw?
And directly in the bylaw document itself. And so that can cause some complexity around doing lookup between documents. Another one is, your bylaws or regulations written in such a way that they're left largely up to interpretation? And so if they're not necessarily black and white, then you may want to see if there's at least some cases or scenarios that you can append to these documents to give some guidance to your AI systems, for example, of how to interpret those regulations.
Amy Villis
So from your perspective, how can automation and AI solutions, driven solutions, help set new standards for transparency and predictability and housing approvals, especially with the demand of increased complexity within those regulatory environments?
Zane Franzen (22:43.182)
So let's think back conceptually to what we were talking about in terms of the availability, if it's digitized, if it's structured well. When we start looking at it in that way, really just the act of getting your data in good shape for automation and AI readiness is already also getting it into a more transparent and predictable state as well. Where it is available, it is digitized, it's well structured, and ideally some subjectivity as much as reasonably possible can be taken out of some of those rules or how things are written. Now, I guess to look at it a little bit more practically, know, once you have your data in good shape, it opens a door for many different external or internal facing solutions. guess lots of range of opportunity there, but it's really looking at both. think you can use this technology to empower external facing, you know, constituents, developers, the general public. But you can also of course use it to expedite your internal processes as well.
When we look at digital workflows and how we're digitizing our process or what we're using, with that internal piece, how could you harness AI in a local government setting to impact internal process or the digestion of some of those digital rules? And I think that's a big piece right now that we're faced with, but still sitting down and trying to manually read a policy document in order to interpret it into digital rules versus using an AI product that will help enable that digitization process.
I think at the end of the day, really does depend on what tools organizations are using to modernize and digitize their internal processes. What I mean by that is, for example, our solution, it's primarily no code. And one of the key benefits of that is that organizations can kind of democratize the use of AI and automation across their teams, where you can have business people, not just technical teams, implementing solutions, trying them out and building generally just solutions to make the overall processes more efficient. This has the impact of really what your team members are able to do. So now you know you're not just a business analyst, but also now you can develop your own solutions and you're an automation developer.
Amy Villis
So what do you see as like the biggest opportunity and challenges in connecting data between local governments and developers? And how can AI make permitting and construction more seamless, like both inside the local government and for the private sector working with the data?
Zane Franzen
So there's one about how do we as a municipal government, for example, expose our data in such a way that other people can consume it and make their processes more efficient, let's say developers or construction companies. And then there's, course, internally, you know, how do we connect all these systems together internally in the first place to make them integrate and talk together and just make the whole process more efficient. There's one example that comes to mind immediately, for example, that we are working with a construction firm and what they are basically doing is they have an AI solution that takes their project plans or internal standards, building guidelines, and they review those plans using an AI solution that will basically flag any types of major concerns before they go ahead and submit it so they can reduce the amount of rework that they need to do in the future. Now this is something that could be expanded on further. For example, that if there were MCP servers or other ways to get data out of the municipal governments about their regulations, that could then make it even more dynamic. Right now, we're kind of statically putting the information there. But if you could easily get it, especially in a standardized way, right, if we could do this across all of the municipalities, or even federally, but that's a whole nother thing, because now we're talking about across provinces. But if that were possible, that would create a huge efficiency because right now, you know, everyone has their documentation in different places, and it's a little bit difficult to access. definitely exposing public information in an accessible format like MCP or even just standard APIs would definitely be a step in the right direction. So I think there's also kind of an aspect around if you have the data, you probably can access it. You just need the right tools to connect and glue things together.
But then I think about the amazing opportunity that we have within our off-site manufacturing side of construction and construction in the traditional sense as well. From that design kit of parts procurement side of stuff through to feasibility of go, no-go kind of production. And then in the manufacturing essence, every manufacturing plant has a bunch of robotics or proprietary software to machinery. And I think about that MCP and I think about how we need to build to that connective tissue to get those efficiencies. And I'm hearing more and more, and maybe you can pick up on this, I am hearing more and more from that sector that efficiencies aren't going to be found in the use of digital robotics, but in digital efficiency finding. Maybe you could speak to that for our offsite manufacturers that are looking to those modern methods of construction and the digital technologies that need to drive them. I guess a couple months ago, just about the whole like smart manufacturing and whatever buzzword you want to put around it, manufacturing 4.0 and so on. But really what it's all about is just how can you embed AI to kind of create predictive smart systems.
And I think, you know, what you're saying is really critical because a lot of people, they think about the housing crisis, they think, the government's slow. That's the number one problem. We need to just solve that. And it is a problem, right? There's definitely improvements we can get to, but, you know, it's a very good point that manufactured housing is going to be a big role in terms of helping us meet the needs that we have. Now, in terms of how manufacturers and how we see them using AI and automation in the processes, I kind of break it down into two main areas.
You have kind of your standard operational back office stuff that's going to be like automating finance processes, like internal IT processes and so on. But I think the more interesting part and maybe a little bit more where your question is going is how do you link together what you're doing on the manufacturing floor? How do you make a smarter manufacturing ecosystem? Now, a really big one we see just to give an example is doing things like predictive maintenance, where, for example, if you can have systems that have APIs, which many do these days,
You can automatically have them pull the data out of those systems. You can feed into a predictive AI system, of the log data's past historical maintenance issues and have the system kind of output. Do we need to a technician to go do maintenance? Do we need to send technician to go review it and so on? And so instead of having just a simple schedule, you can actually proactively start catching some of these issues. The other thing as well that we see, for example, is that if manufacturers have processes and procedures.
Again, maybe this is more on the quality assurance side. It can also be on the maintenance side. You have the ability to set up maybe an AI assistant that your field ground workers are able to go ahead and ask questions to quickly look up information that maybe they would traditionally have to go back to the laptop to do, which of course is not efficient. And so all these little small things, once you implement them as a whole, add up to quite a bit.
Yeah, and I agree with the little bits to the whole is, is the multiple actors that play a role. So all of the various AECs and, you know, the mechanical, electrical and plumbing folks all work in their own, I want to say their own data bubbles. And if we're able to seem together and harness that where the efficiencies could be found.
Amy Villis (30:15.872)
And, you know, traditionally we look at costs or time and all of those equating to more positive production of housing.
Zane Franzen
It reminds me of an article I was afforded a couple of weeks ago by a colleague and basically it quoted the CMHC and they had reported that about 10 to 20 % of the cost of new residential units in Vancouver are government fees. So when we're talking about modernization as a way to drive public benefits for affordability and access, in my view, I think we're really talking about how to cut down on a big part of these 20 % of the fees and the operational processing costs are kind of the inputs into that.
There are other benefits too, know, outside of the 20%, you know, if we have a faster approval process, then developers would have less cost overheads because projects would be moving faster. I think the first principle that comes to mind, and this really goes for any modernization effort in any sector, is that the benefits are only real if they're actually actualized. And so if we want to drive government approval efficiencies, which tangibly also reduce housing costs, we need to somehow pass on those costs one way or another.
And so maybe that means, you know, pausing annual inflation hikes to those fees. Maybe that means directly cutting the development fees. But if we don't actually reduce those fees, then it's nice. We've made our government a little bit more efficient, but at the end of the day, the cost will still be built into the end cost of the unit. But purely from an economic point of view, if we can lower the costs for the developers and put in probably some incentive plans to help them pass it on forwards, then we could actually achieve some tangible benefits.
Amy Villis (31:56.266)
Looking forward, where do you see the biggest opportunity for leadership and innovation in streamlining, harmonize, permitting and approvals at a regional or national level in Canada?
Zane Franzen
I think the biggest area of opportunity is if we can come together and create a standard for how this data can be accessed. And it's a lot of people to pull together and it's a lot of levels of government which have conflicting priorities. But there's a great effort being done by the BC government looking to standardize the digitization of the BC building codes.
Amy Villis
That's excellent. So innovation, integration, two different things. One, innovating in new API spaces or integration with existing standard tools like BIM or GIS or ERP systems. Maybe touch around how you feel the industry is meeting the use of existing tools or the creation of new ones.
Zane Franzen
AI, we like automation, we want to improve our APIs and the data that we make available and we use ourselves. And the next natural question is, okay, how do we do it? There's a lot of industry vendors who are taking up kind of the call and going ahead and building these integrations into common third parties. So for example, you've got those common platforms you're mentioning there like BIM and GIS and so on.
Where the systems are already set up to use that data and can easily connect them all up together. So that, guess, is more specialized approach. Then there's other tools, which are a little bit more generic, where you can actually go ahead and integrate with anything and they'll get you, you know, 80, 90 % of the way. And that's largely good for a lot of use cases. And then maybe use some more specialized tools for specialized ones. Now, the other piece that organizations are considering, especially around AI is let's build it ourselves. Let's do it in-house.
Zane Franzen (33:45.086)
And actually I think I hear that about half the time whenever we're talking to an organization about using our solution. And I always tell them that, you know, go ahead. But what happens most of the time after we go and reconnect with them is that nothing really has been done and all those benefits have been lost. And so I think that's really the key thing. Keep in mind for organizations when they're considering buy versus build is that first of all, do we have the capacity to do this? Like we want this automation, we want this new modernization project, are we throwing it at our IT team? Because business wants it, we have the money for it, but IT doesn't have capacity. And so nothing will get done. Or is the IT team knowledgeable enough? So they may still be learning and they won't be able to deliver. And the other thing is about just quality, where for AI, know, getting to 80 % is easy, getting to 100 is very difficult. And so that's where specialists kind of come in. And some teams have it, you know, some organizations are huge, they have internal AI teams, they can do it themselves but a lot of them are not AI organizations, but they definitely can work to become them.
Amy Villis
So if Canada could invest in one digital technology or innovation right now to truly accelerate housing delivery, what would it be and why does it stand out to you?
Zane Franzen
I would say a key way that Canada could invest is if we could do two things. One, if we could help standardize some of these building codes and two, if we could build some sort of tool to help do things like pre approvals or validations on project plans so that these projects can be processed much more quickly and efficiently.
Amy Villis (35:18.808)
Thank you so much to Renee and Zane for sharing their insights and experiences on what digital transformation really means for housing in Canada. Today's conversation showed how technology and collaboration can come together to make housing delivery more transparent, predictable, and efficient. Up next, we'll dig into workforce transformation, how microcredentials, the gig economy, and AI are reshaping skills and productivity across construction. It's all about people, collaboration, and turning innovation into real impact.
This podcast is powered by Digital's Housing Growth Innovation Program with support from the province of British Columbia and the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs.