Earlier this year, we were selected for the Salesforce Accelerator: a programme that gives mission-driven organisations the funding, technology, and pro bono expert support to build AI tools that make a real difference. We’re now exploring what AI for homelessness case management could look like in practice and what it might mean for the frontline workers and organisations we support.
We’ve been working hard on it since April. Now we’re ready to talk about what we’re building and why we think it matters. (Read the press release here.)
Let’s start with the problem: the admin burden on homelessness frontline workers
You already know this one.
Frontline staff in homelessness services typically spend 30-50% of their working day on administration. Case notes, referral paperwork, reporting – the list goes on. In a sector that’s already under enormous pressure, that’s a huge amount of time that isn’t spent directly with the vulnerable people who need support.
It’s also one of the biggest drivers of burnout. People come into this sector because they want to help. They don’t leave because they’ve stopped caring – they leave because the admin burden never stops.
We’ve spent years building tools that try to make that burden lighter. But we wanted to go further.
So we asked: what would it look like if AI took the admin off people’s plates?
That’s the question at the heart of what we’re now building.
Using Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent platform, we’re exploring how to reduce the time case workers in homelessness services spend on routine admin tasks and hand that time back to the people and communities they serve. We’re still working through exactly what form that will take, but the ambition is clear.
We’re currently piloting it with three of our customers, whose feedback will shape how it develops.
The outcomes we’re working towards include:
- Significantly less time spent on routine documentation and admin
- More time for direct client work – the reason most people came into this profession
- Better quality and consistency in record-keeping
- Faster onboarding for new staff joining a service
- Richer data to support reporting, funding bids and outcomes measurement
- A reduction in staff burnout
This is just the starting point. Once the foundations are in place, the possibilities open up: prioritising referrals, risk detection, early warning alerts, workload insights for staff and much more.
What the Salesforce Accelerator – Agents for Impact programme involves
The Salesforce Accelerator isn’t just a grant – though the funding is genuinely helpful. It also brings us a team of Salesforce experts who are volunteering their time to work with us: a project manager, a technical architect, and a solution architect.
We meet with them every week. We’re also part of a wider cohort of organisations going through the programme at the same time, which means we get to learn from people who’ve been through it before – what worked, what didn’t, what they’d do differently. That peer learning has been one of the most valuable parts of the whole experience.
We have six months to build a prototype and in October we’ll be demoing our pilot solution to Salesforce and the broader cohort.
Why In-Form’s approach to AI in the homelessness sector is different
Nearly every other organisation in this programme is building AI for their own team or the people they directly support. In-Form is different – we’re a platform used by hundreds of homelessness organisations across the UK, which means what we build could eventually reach tens of thousands of frontline workers.
Why reducing admin in homelessness services feels important right now
We talk a lot in this sector about doing more with less. We’re not sure that’s always the right frame, people aren’t asking for more, they’re asking for the time and space to do their jobs well.
That’s what we’re trying to build. Not a replacement for the relationships and judgement that make great case work possible, but something that takes the repetitive, draining admin burden off people’s plates so they can focus on what they’re actually there to do.
Ending homelessness takes systems change. It takes workers who can stay in the profession because it isn’t grinding them down. It takes services with good enough data to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Technology can play a real role in all of that. We’re building with that in mind.
