You absolutely can, and many people do. But here’s what you’ll run into:
General LLMs don’t have current, city-specific data.
ChatGPT and Claude have knowledge cutoffs and don’t automatically pull live zoning codes, planned overlays, or general plan designations. You’d need to manually feed them the right documents, and even then you’re often working with outdated county-level data instead of current city regulations.
You have to do the research before you can ask the question.
With a general LLM, you still need to track down zoning codes, municipal codes, and planning documents yourself. ChatAEC already has that data indexed and ready — you just ask the question and get an answer based on the most current city-level information.
No built-in AEC workflows.
General LLMs are powerful, but they aren’t designed around the workflows of architects, engineers, developers, and planners. ChatAEC is purpose-built for due diligence, feasibility analysis, zoning research, and permit planning, so outputs are structured for how you actually work.
Speed and reliability matter.
When you’re evaluating a site or preparing a submittal, you need answers fast and you need them to be right. ChatAEC is optimized for this — pulling the right data, summarizing it accurately, and delivering it in a format you can act on immediately.Think of it this way: You could use a general LLM the same way you could use Google. But just like you wouldn’t piece together a zoning analysis from 15 different search results, you don’t want to spend time prompting and re-prompting a general AI when you could get a complete, accurate answer in seconds.
