How AI can power a culture of continuous campus planning

This blog post was authored by Kushan Dave, Client Leader, Education Practice, CannonDesign; and Frances Fox, AIA, Principal and Client Leader, Education Practice, CannonDesign.

Higher education institutions can no longer afford to treat master planning as a once-a-decade exercise. Enrollment swings, evolving pedagogies, aging infrastructure and shifting student expectations demand a more nimble, responsive and data-informed approach—one that emerging AI technologies are uniquely positioned to support. 

The common practice of launching a comprehensive facility master plan every 10 years has led many higher education leaders to adopt a reactive mindset. It’s an approach that often lacks the necessary flexibility and adaptability to respond to the rapidly changing needs of the campus community and the ever-evolving landscape of higher education.  

Moreover, the process itself is resource-intensive and requires 12 to 18 months of sustained engagement, analysis and coordination by the institution. By the time the plan is published, its relevance may already be fading. In many cases, three to five years into the 10-year plan, the framework no longer accurately reflects campus needs.

Why does the planning process take so long, anyway?  

There are two key tasks at the start of any master plan process—engagement and data readiness. This balance of qualitative and quantitative data is the foundation for decision making and creation of sound recommendations tied to an institution’s strategic plan. 

Engagement is invaluable because it incorporates the lived experience, perspectives, needs and hopes of a broad pool of stakeholders. The process includes institutional and facilities leaders, faculty, students, alumni, prospective students, parents, community members and local industry representatives. This firsthand knowledge and rich experiences of diverse stakeholders are essential to consensus building, but gathering this input is time-consuming and often manual.  

At the same time, data related to space inventory, space utilization and deferred maintenance can quickly become outdated. These data sources often live in silos, lack integration and do not have dedicated staff to maintain them annually. As a result, institutional leaders often spend the early phases of a master planning effort simply trying to “catch up.” 

But what if institutions didn’t have to start from scratch each time?

AI as a planning orchestrator  

In traditional master planning, the project manager is a central figure responsible for keeping everything on track—from stakeholder coordination and data gathering to timelines, budgets and communications. But in a continuous planning environment, where updates and recalibration happen more frequently, even the most organized team can struggle to maintain momentum.  

This is where AI can serve as a valuable orchestrator. 

Rather than replacing the human project manager, AI can assist by automating routine coordination tasks: sending reminders for data updates, flagging misalignments between goals and available data, tracking stakeholder inputs over time and surfacing action items as priorities shift. These tools can help maintain rhythm and alignment in an interactive or annual “mini-planning” cycles.

AI facility planning dashboard for institutions 

Many institutional facility leaders are feeling the pressure of managing aging structures, limited budgets and hundreds of facility repair and maintenance requests on a regular basis. Additionally, shrinking staff numbers across higher education are forcing design, construction and facility management staff to continue operating their departments with extremely lean teams. Receiving, prioritizing and resolving facility requests often happens in an inefficient and clunky way. 

Our team is currently developing a dashboard to receive, sort, analyze requests and recommend actions based on set parameters. It streamlines workflows by automating decision-making for facility repair and maintenance requests, eliminating the need to reference multiple data sources. This dashboard will be designed to support recordkeeping and clean data maintenance over time, enabling campus leaders and their design teams to get updated facility maintenance data at any time.

Paradigm shift? Yes. But it’s worth it. 

Imagine a future where campus master planning is no longer a massive, once-a-decade undertaking but rather a seamless and iterative process. Instead of resetting every ten years, institutions could engage in annual or biannual tune-ups to refresh priorities, align with real-time data and refine capital strategies. This “lighter touch” is made possible by providing AI tools needed to continuously update data sets and streamline stakeholder input.

The first step is for institutional leaders to embrace the power of AI to eliminate the traditional methods of data management. By doing so, they position their campuses to respond swiftly to change, strengthen the health and connectivity of their physical spaces and build environments that can truly support the evolving needs of students, faculty and communities for generations to come. 

With AI as a planning partner, higher education doesn’t just plan for the future—it builds it in real time.