- Prince William-backed Homewards program looks to use AI to boost chair efforts
- Homewards works with partners like Salesforce to use AI agents and workflows
- Salesforce will provide AI agent services to help free up time and capacity
A homelessness program backed by Prince William has unveiled new plans to try to tackle the problem with data and technology.
Homewards is teaming up with Salesforce to launch its new Homelessness Data Lab, which will bring together over 25 organizations across business, government and frontline services.
The program was unveiled by the Prince at London Tech Week 2026, when he took to the main stage for its official launch, alongside executives from Salesforce, NatWest and Bloomberg.
Using artificial intelligence to tackle homelessness
“It’s about building a model that shows that homelessness is preventable,” Prince William said at the launch, “the earlier you deal with the problem, the better.”
Founded in 2023, Homewards has big goals when it comes to eliminating homelessness and tries to spot the signs that people may be in trouble 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 wide range of industries and sectors.
“It’s such an important project, … there’s not 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 the risk of homelessness, as Salesforce will deploy autonomous AI agents with the Homeless Link service to handle the burden of administrative workflows, freeing up frontline staff to truly connect face-to-face with those who may be struggling.
“We’re really proud to be using artificial intelligence in that way to unlock human capacity and enable these frontline workers,” Bahrololoumi noted.
“We can only gain from that…AI will help us identify the interventions that will actually work.”
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