The UK government just handed Google DeepMind a very specific homework assignment: make housing approvals faster using AI. The result is a prototype tool called Extract, launched on June 9, 2025, by Prime Minister Keir Starmer at London Tech Week.
Extract uses DeepMind’s Gemini multimodal model to digitize historical planning documents, including maps, handwritten notes, and the kind of paperwork that currently takes council workers up to two hours per document to process manually. The AI tool does it in roughly 40 seconds.
What Extract actually does
Pilot programs ran across four local councils, and the results were notable. Processing times dropped from approximately two hours to about 40 seconds per document.
The national rollout to all English local authorities is planned for spring 2026.
