Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here and quite clearly it’s here to stay. While some understandably see it as a risk or threat, others are embracing the opportunities that it brings. The latest figures appear to support this sentiment.
According to the most recent Business and Insights Conditions Survey, approximately one-in-six businesses are currently implementing at least one AI application. What’s more, research by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in June 2023 showed that general awareness, experience of, and trust in AI is growing in the UK.
The biggest driver around its usage, according to the ONS, is creating efficiencies (35 per cent), a reason that’s hard to argue with, particularly in the housing sector. In an economic climate that is placing untold demand on housing providers and local authorities alike, the need to do more with less has never been more pressing.
AI in social housing
The pace of change being driven by AI has led to fervent debate as well as apprehension.
As with anything that’s attracting so much attention, there will always be a certain amount of misunderstanding, misinformation and blatant fear-mongering. AI is regularly challenged on cost of implementation, its ability to retain the human element in customer services, whether it can be neutral and unbiased, and, oh, it’s also going to take over everyone’s jobs. But AI has an important role to play in helping the sector to address its key challenges.
The reality is that AI is a rapidly-evolving technology but it’s also one that we already use in our daily lives. From Google searches to making payments using mobile-phone facial recognition, AI is part of our lives and is helping to make them more efficient and effective. So why should its use in social housing be any different?
AI offers a transformative approach to addressing major challenges within society as a whole and particularly in the social housing sector, including plugging significant resource gaps and supplementing the role of housing officers. Indeed, many organisations and individuals across the globe are embracing AI and machine learning to achieve more effective and efficient decisions, streamlined processes and increased productivity. This shift offers significant benefits to our sector, which is characterised by a variety of resource-intensive activities and sensitive decision-making requirements.
AI is already shaping social housing
In today’s economic and social climate, the need to create deeper engagement and more effective outcomes with communities has never been greater. This includes ethical and responsible AI-assisted software that supports housing providers and creates an equitable digital landscape for customers and their communities.
However, with significant misinformation and a lack of understanding clouding the debate around AI, there’s an argument that we must start by educating the sector on the benefits of using AI in a responsible and ethical way.
In a best-case scenario, AI has the potential to solve many challenges. These include operational efficiency, service-level improvements and better tenant outcomes. In contrast, old rules-based income analytics systems, for example, can only help prioritise actions based on rigid, pre-defined rules. While they can support income officers in refining a to-do list, they don’t do any analyses or assessments that help in making the quickest, fairest and most unbiased decisions nor do they automate any engagement processes.
What does ethical AI mean?
- Mitigating bias – Mitigating bias in AI is a shared responsibility; it requires a collaborative effort to ensure AI models are fair and help to shape an equitable digital future.
- Data protection and compliance – This is an essential component of AI that enables organisations to strike the right balance between utility and confidentiality and ensure that the data processed is not only secure but also used ethically and responsibly.
- Decision-maker empowerment – There’s immense power of placing human intuition, experience and oversight in the middle of AI decision-making. Rather than replace it, AI serves to enhance human judgement, ensuring that decisions are always made with empathy and understanding.
- Better results for all parties – AI should be a catalyst for engagement. By intelligently automating processes, it not only streamlines operations but also significantly boosts engagement rates with tenants.
AI in action
In 2021, leading housing provider Thirteen Group had a challenge: to free up housing services coordinators’ time to better manage debt recovery amid a global pandemic and an emerging cost-of-living crisis.
With debt recovery becoming an increasing challenge, Thirteen wanted to implement a system that would accurately predict customers’ behaviour, allowing its income teams to prioritise and focus their resources more efficiently.
Thirteen worked with Voicescape to develop Caseload Manager. This innovative technology assesses a range of long- and short-term risk factors to make intelligent predictions about individual cases of arrears.
Harnessing the combined powers of AI, machine learning, data science and behavioural insights, it reviews residents’ behaviour and risks before automating each stage of the rent arrears management process, freeing up housing staff to support those needing manual interventions.
Since Thirteen’s original implementation, Caseload Manager has:
- Resulted in Thirteen recovering £800,000 in the first few weeks and maintaining a better overall arrears position of around £250,000 per week;
- Taken 2,000 people out of debt;
- Reduced evictions by 40 per cent;
- Reduced the amount transferred to former debt by 12 per cent;
- Reduced the number of arrears cases requiring manual intervention by 65 per cent, equivalent to 26 cases per housing coordinator and 6.5 FTEs released per week;
- Enabled Thirteen to recover its arrears position following seasonal peaks, allowing it to stabilise its debt faster;
- Increased employee satisfaction, with 86 per cent of officers saying that automation has made their day-to-day jobs easier.
AI – the future
AI is undoubtedly here to stay so the housing sector needs to work together to harness it in the best way possible.
While there are challenges to overcome, productive discussions are needed in order to harness AI so that it delivers streamlined processes and superior tenant outcomes.
Gary Haynes is the managing director of Voicescape.
