- Prince William-backed Homewards programme looks to use AI to boost chairty efforts
- Homewards is working with partners such as Salesforce to utilize AI agents and workflows
- Salesforce will be providing AI agent services to help free up time and capacity
A homelessness programme backed by Prince William has revealed new plans to try and tackle the issue with data and technology.
Homewards is teaming up with Salesforce to launch its new Homelessness Data Lab, which will unite over 25 organisations across business, government, and frontline services.
The programme was revealed by the Prince at London Tech Week 2026, as he took to the keynote stage for its official launch, joined by leaders from Salesforce, NatWest and Bloomberg.
Using AI to tackle homelessness
“It’s about building a model that shows homelessness is preventable,” Prince William said at the launch, “the earlier you deal with the problem, the better.”
Founded in 2023, Homewards has big aims when it comes to eliminating homelessnes, attempting to spot the signs suggesting people may be in difficulty before the damage happens.
Homewards says 430,000 people are currently experiencing homelessness in the UK, which is enough to fill Wembley Stadium more than four times over.
But it has high hopes for the Homelessness Data Lab, which Salesforce UK&I CEO Zahra Bahrololoumi explained can help improve collaboration across a whole host of industries and sectors.
“It’s such an important project,…there’s no one single cause, it can happen for a multitude of reasons,” she noted, “if we can make it predictable, we can prevent it…there’s such a rich set of data.”
Bahrololoumi outlined the need to better support staff to detect risk of homelessness, as Salesforce will be deploying autonomous AI agents with the Homeless Link service to handle the burden of administrative workflows, freeing up frontline workers to really connect face-to-face with those who may be struggling.
“We’re really proud to be using AI in that way, to release human capacity and enable these frontline workers,” Bahrololoumi noted.
“We can only win from that…AI will help us identify the interventions that will actually work.”
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