Artificial intelligence could speed up permitting procedures for projects like data centers or wind farms, Microsoft President Brad Smith told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “There are so many places today where it takes more time to get a permit to say, construct a wind turbine, than it does to build and construct the wind turbine,” he said, adding that companies “massively need more work to accelerate this.” Smith said Microsoft has around 872 permitting processes in progress globally and there is rarely any doubt that a permit will be issued at the end of them, and some tools are ideal for the job. “What you’re doing is taking a spec and comparing data to it, then a human being has to do all that work and identify where there’s a mismatch,” he said. “But when you just think about that, AI is really quite good at that,” he said.