- Homewards program backed by Prince William seeks to use artificial intelligence to boost the presidency’s efforts
- Homewards is working with partners like Salesforce to use AI agents and workflows
- Salesforce to provide AI agent services to help free up time and capacity
A homelessness program backed by Prince William has revealed new plans to try to tackle the problem with data and technology.
Homewards is partnering with Salesforce to launch its new Homeless Data Lab, bringing together more than 25 organizations from business, government and frontline services.
The program was revealed by the Prince at London Tech Week 2026, as he took to the main stage for its official launch, accompanied by leaders from Salesforce, NatWest and Bloomberg.
Using AI to address homelessness
“This is about building a model that shows homelessness is preventable,” Prince William said at the launch, “the sooner the problem is tackled, the better.”
Founded in 2023, Homewards has big goals when it comes to eliminating homelessness, trying to spot the signs that suggest people may be in difficulty before damage occurs.
Homewards says 430,000 people are currently homeless in the UK, enough to fill Wembley Stadium more than four times over.
But she has high hopes for the Homelessness Data Lab, which Salesforce UK&I CEO Zahra Bahrololoumi explained can help improve collaboration across a host of industries and sectors.
“It’s such an important project… there’s no one cause, it can happen for a multitude of reasons,” he said, “if we can make it predictable, we can prevent it… there’s a very rich data set.”
Bahrololoumi highlighted the need to better support staff to detect the risk of homelessness, as Salesforce will deploy autonomous AI agents with the Homeless Link service to handle the load of administrative workflows, freeing up frontline workers to truly connect face-to-face with those who may be struggling.
“We’re really proud to use AI in that way, to unlock human capacity and empower these frontline workers,” Bahrololoumi said.
“We can only win from that… AI will help us identify the interventions that will really work.”
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