When governments first hear about an AI agent handling permitting conversations, there is usually a version of the same concern that surfaces quickly, sometimes spoken directly, sometimes sitting just underneath the conversation.
What if it gets something wrong? What if it makes a commitment we can't keep? What if we lose control of the process?
These are not unreasonable concerns. They are, in fact, exactly the right questions for a local government to ask before deploying any new tool that touches the public. And they deserve a direct answer.
Clara was not built to take control of your permitting process. It was built to extend it, carefully, configurably, and entirely on your terms. The question is never "how much does Clara take over?" The question is "where does Clara help, and where do your people step in?" That line is yours to draw.
Before getting into configuration, it's worth sitting with what around-the-clock availability actually means for a permitting office.
Your staff work business hours. Maybe 8 to 5, Monday through Friday. That's roughly 45 hours per week when someone can answer a question or receive an application. The other hours of the week, evenings, weekends, early mornings, applicants are on their own.
For many of the people submitting permits, those hours are when they actually have time to work on it. The contractor who is on a job site all day and can only review their paperwork at 8 PM. The homeowner who is pulling together documents on a Sunday afternoon before a Monday deadline. The small business owner who realizes at 10 PM that they're missing something critical.
Right now, those people either make their best guess and hope for the best, or they wait until Monday morning to call. Clara changes that entirely. Any applicant, at any hour, can start a conversation, get accurate guidance based on your jurisdiction's actual requirements, and work through their submission until it's right. Not tomorrow. Not after a three-week wait for a correspondence cycle. Tonight, if that's when they need it.
That availability doesn't cost your staff anything. No overtime. No on-call rotation. Clara handles the conversation, and your team picks up exactly where the process is designed to hand off, with a complete, reviewed, ready-to-process application.
One of the most important things to understand about Clara is that it is not a single, fixed product. It is a configurable service, and what it does in your jurisdiction depends on what you ask it to do.
At one end of the spectrum, Clara can serve purely as a guidance and completeness tool. It answers applicant questions, walks people through requirements, reviews uploaded documents for completeness, and confirms when a submission package appears ready. Nothing is formally submitted until a staff member has had eyes on it. Clara is the guide; your team remains the gatekeeper.
At the other end, Clara can be configured to handle intake end-to-end for routine permit types, residential additions, fence permits, sign applications, minor commercial improvements, routing completed submissions directly into your review queue without requiring staff involvement in the pre-submission phase. Applications that meet all completeness criteria move forward automatically. Anything that doesn't gets sent back to the applicant with specific guidance on what's missing.
Between those two ends is a wide range of configurations that most jurisdictions will find themselves in, Clara handling some permit types fully, others partially, and flagging others for staff involvement from the start based on complexity, zoning considerations, or anything else your team identifies as requiring human judgment.
The point is that you are not choosing between full automation and no automation. You are choosing which tasks belong to Clara and which belong to your people, and that line can be drawn differently for different project types, different stages of the process, and different points in your department's readiness to expand what the agent handles.
This is worth saying plainly, because the concern about AI in government workplaces is real and deserves to be addressed honestly.
Clara does not replace plans examiners. It does not replace permit technicians. It does not replace the professional judgment that experienced staff bring to complex applications, variance requests, or anything that requires interpretation of competing codes and considerations.
What Clara replaces is the work that no one signed up for and everyone resents, answering the same intake questions for the hundredth time, writing follow-up letters about missing signatures, reviewing submissions that were clearly not ready, and managing the inbox backlog that grows every time an incomplete application enters the queue.
When Clara handles that layer of the process, your staff's day changes. The queue they review in the morning contains applications that have already passed a completeness check. The calls they field are substantive rather than routine. The time they used to spend chasing paperwork is available for the technical review work they are actually trained and licensed to do.
In jurisdictions where staffing is tight and the gap between permit volume and capacity is widening, that shift is not marginal. It is the difference between a department that is perpetually behind and one that can actually perform.
One of the most practically important decisions in configuring Clara is designing the handoff, the moment when Clara's role ends and your team's begins.
This looks different depending on how your department operates and what you have asked Clara to handle. But the underlying principle is consistent: the handoff should be clean, well-documented, and structured so that whatever arrives on a staff member's desk is genuinely ready for them.
When Clara completes a pre-submission conversation, it doesn't just pass along whatever the applicant uploaded. It passes along a structured package, the submitted documents, a completeness summary, a record of what requirements were reviewed during the conversation, and any flags or notes that Clara identified along the way. Staff open a file and immediately know what they are looking at, what has been checked, and what still requires their professional review.
For departments that want a staff member to review before formal intake, even after Clara has cleared a submission, that review step is simply built into the workflow. Clara does its work. The application lands in a pre-intake queue. A staff member takes a final look and releases it into the formal process. The completeness work is already done. The review takes minutes instead of the hour it might have taken before.
No two permitting processes are identical. Jurisdictions differ in the types of permits they issue, the codes they enforce, the workflows they use internally, and the volume and complexity of applications they handle. A coastal city reviewing shoreline development applications has different needs than a fast-growing inland suburb processing hundreds of residential permits a month. A small town with two permit technicians has different constraints than a mid-sized city with a dedicated building department.
Clara is configured for your context, not a generic government template applied uniformly regardless of fit.
That configuration process is part of how Clara is deployed. Your team works with Polco to identify which permit types Clara should handle, what your completeness standards are for each, where the handoff points sit, how escalation works for complex or unusual submissions, and what the applicant-facing experience should look and feel like. The knowledge base is built from your documentation. The workflows are mapped to your processes. The boundaries are set by your department.
This is also not a one-time configuration. As your team gains experience with Clara and identifies new opportunities, or new boundaries that need adjusting, the configuration evolves. Clara can take on more over time, or pull back from areas where your team decides human involvement is preferable. The relationship between Clara and your department grows and adapts, rather than being fixed at deployment.
From the resident or developer side, Clara doesn't look like a configuration exercise. It looks like finally getting a straight answer.
The experience is conversational. An applicant describes what they want to do, and Clara begins guiding them through what's required, in plain language, not the formal code terminology that makes municipal documents so difficult for non-specialists to navigate. If they have a question, they ask it. If they're confused about a requirement, they say so. Clara works through it with them.
They can come back to the conversation the next day, or the next week, as they gather documents and work through the process at their own pace. They can upload drafts and get feedback before they finalize. They can ask the same question five different ways until the answer makes sense.
And when they finally submit, they submit with confidence, because Clara has reviewed their package and confirmed it meets the requirements. Not told them it looks fine. Confirmed, specifically, that each required element is present and in order.
That confidence matters. It reduces the anxiety that accompanies any interaction with government processes. It builds trust. And it changes the way residents and developers experience their relationship with city hall, from one defined by waiting and uncertainty to one defined by clarity and forward momentum.
For departments that are apprehensive about where to begin, the answer is simply: start with the problem that costs you the most time.
Identify the permit type that generates the highest volume of incomplete submissions. Or the one that generates the most repetitive questions. Or the one that has the longest average processing time due to back-and-forth correspondence. Start there.
Configure Clara for that permit type. Build the knowledge base from the documentation you already have. Define the completeness criteria your team uses when reviewing submissions. Design the handoff so it fits your existing workflow. Run it, watch it, and refine it.
Then expand from there, when your team is ready, at a pace that makes sense, into the areas where Clara's involvement adds the most value.
The goal is not to automate everything at once. The goal is to make the process work better, for applicants who deserve clarity and responsiveness, and for staff who deserve to spend their expertise on work that actually requires it.
That's what Clara is for. And it starts exactly where you decide to start.
Clara is available now as Polco's flagship AI permitting agent. To explore how Clara can be configured for your jurisdiction's specific workflows and permit types, Request Information below!