Turning Plans into Places: A Conversation with Avolve CEO Becky Tamashasky

Public agencies are being asked to deliver more than ever—more housing, more infrastructure, faster development, better experiences, and greater transparency—with more regulations but often without more people or resources to do it.

In this interview, Avolve CEO Becky Tamashasky talks about what she is seeing across the public sector, why the way communities deliver infrastructure needs to evolve, and how technology can help civic leaders turn ambitious plans into places people are proud to call home.

You’ve worked with public agencies for more than 20 years. What feels different about the challenges civic leaders are facing today?

The expectations have changed dramatically. Communities need more housing. They need to modernize aging infrastructure. They’re competing for economic development and talent. Citizens and developers expect faster, more transparent experiences. And leaders are being asked to deliver all of that while dealing with workforce constraints, growing regulation, and increasingly complex infrastructure.

What really stands out to me is how interconnected everything has become. A housing initiative isn’t just about housing. It depends on planning, permitting, utilities, transportation, public works, and capital investment all moving together. The same is true for economic development or a major infrastructure project.

That means the challenge is no longer simply, “How do we make this one process faster?” It’s becoming, “How do we increase our capacity to deliver?”

The communities that answer that question will have an enormous opportunity. Because ultimately, people experience government through what gets done. Can you build the housing? Can you improve the infrastructure? Can you provide quality services to residents? Can you deliver on the commitments you’ve made? That ability to deliver is an important part of how public trust is built.

You’ve described many communities as being caught in a complexity trap. What does that look like in practice?

It usually doesn’t look like one enormous problem that can be boiled down to a single issue. It’s hundreds of smaller points of friction that accumulate.

A project moves from one department to another. Information gets handed off between systems. Another stakeholder gets involved. A regulation requires another review. Someone who has understood a process for 25 years retires and takes institutional knowledge with them. The approved plan changes in the field, but that change doesn’t always make its way back into the permanent record.

Each of those things creates a little more complexity. And because infrastructure delivery is so interconnected, a delay or information gap in one place can cascade through everything that follows.

The natural response is often to add people, increase budgets, or buy another point solution. But that doesn’t necessarily solve the underlying problem. In some cases, it adds another system or handoff and more overhead maintenance for those constrained resources.

That’s what we’re calling the Complexity Trap: the harder you work within a fragmented system, the harder it can become to keep up with what the community needs from you.

You are introducing the idea of Community Infrastructure Delivery. What is it, and why should civic leaders think about infrastructure this way?

Community Infrastructure Delivery is the coordinated process that turns a community’s plans and investments into the places people actually experience.

It stretches from readiness and planning through review and approval, construction, and ultimately the ongoing life of that infrastructure. It’s the connective tissue between design and execution.

Historically, we’ve tended to treat many of those activities as separate workflows. Different departments own them. Different technologies support them. Different people hold different pieces of the information.

But the infrastructure itself doesn’t experience those boundaries. A decision made during plan review can affect construction. What happens during construction affects the accuracy of the as-built record. That record becomes important for maintenance, emergency response, future capital planning, and eventually redevelopment.

When civic leaders start looking at that as one connected delivery lifecycle, the conversation changes. Instead of optimizing individual transactions, you can start thinking about how to increase the community’s overall capacity to deliver.

What changes when communities connect the entire infrastructure delivery lifecycle instead of treating it as a series of separate workflows?

You begin to replace handoffs with orchestration.

People have shared context. Information can follow a project instead of being recreated at each stage. Decisions made upstream remain useful downstream. Leaders have better visibility into what’s moving, what’s stuck, and where attention is needed.

And your existing investments start working harder together. Your people, project data, GIS, technology, capital investments, and, increasingly, AI aren’t separate assets. When you orchestrate the work around them, they can reinforce one another.

That creates a multiplier effect. You can improve speed and coordination. You can make better use of scarce expertise. You can increase transparency and make better decisions. And you can increase delivery capacity without assuming the answer is simply to expand government.

That’s a very different ambition from making one workflow a little faster.

Technology is clearly part of that shift. Where do you see data, spatial intelligence, and AI having the greatest impact?

Technology matters when it helps people do their jobs better and make better decisions.

Spatial intelligence is a great example. Infrastructure is inherently physical. Where something is being proposed, what surrounds it, what it connects to, and what it may affect are all essential to understanding the project. Bringing GIS directly into infrastructure delivery gives people that real-world context as they make decisions.

Data is equally important, particularly as we think about AI. There’s enormous excitement around AI right now, and rightly so. But an AI agent layered onto fragmented or unreliable data isn’t going to solve the underlying problem. Trust matters even more in an AI world.

The real opportunity is applied AI grounded in permissioned, validated, real-world data and deep domain expertise. That’s where AI can automate repetitive work, surface insights, and expand the capacity of experienced professionals.

For us, the goal isn’t to take humans out of the process. It’s the opposite. Let technology handle more of the repetitive work so people can spend more time on judgment, expertise, and the decisions that really matter. And when we can reduce the administrative burden, we give people more time to do what brought many of them to public service in the first place: solving problems, serving their communities, and making a positive impact.

What role does Avolve play in helping communities make that shift?

For more than 20 years, Avolve has helped public agencies improve one of the most critical parts of infrastructure delivery: plan review and approval. That gives us a very strong foundation because the approved plan contains information that matters throughout the life of an infrastructure asset.

We see an opportunity to build on that foundation and help communities orchestrate more of the Community Infrastructure Delivery lifecycle.

For us, orchestration means connecting the people, processes, data, systems, and decisions required to move infrastructure from plan through construction and sustainment. Rather than optimizing one isolated step, we want to help preserve context and intelligence as the work moves forward.

There are three capabilities that are especially important to how we do that.

First is end-to-end orchestration, connecting work across the delivery lifecycle. Second is spatial intelligence, including our deep partnership with Esri, so teams can understand projects in their real-world geographic context. And third is applied AI grounded in the deep domain data and expertise Avolve has built over more than two decades of working with public agencies.

Plan review remains a critical starting point. The bigger opportunity is making the intelligence created there useful throughout the lifecycle.

That’s how we see Avolve helping communities move from improving individual processes to strengthening the entire system that turns plans into places.

At the end of the day, what does better infrastructure delivery make possible for a community, and for the leaders responsible for shaping its future?

At the most practical level, it means projects move more predictably. Departments work together more effectively. Capital gets put to work sooner. Decisions are based on better information. Citizens and developers have more transparent experiences and the time to construction shortens.

But those improvements compound.

Better infrastructure delivery helps communities create housing, attract investment, support economic growth, improve resilience, and respond to what their citizens need. And when people consistently see their government deliver on its commitments, you create trust. I think that’s the bigger opportunity here.

Most civic leaders didn’t choose public service because they wanted to manage workflows. They want to make their communities better. They want to build something that lasts. They want to leave the next generation with a place that is stronger than the one they inherited.

The plans matter. The processes matter. The technology matters. And the partners behind that technology matter. That is why Avolve has intentionally aligned with Esri and Microsoft, trusted providers of software for government agencies. But ultimately, all of it exists to serve something bigger: the places communities create. That’s what we mean when we talk about turning plans into places.