UK's Prince William says AI can help to tackle homelessness

Britain's Prince William has launched a data lab to use artificial intelligence and analyse data to predict and prevent homelessness, a cause he has long supported.

Britain's Prince William said artificial intelligence ​was being harnessed to identify people at ​risk of homelessness, enabling early ‌intervention ​to keep them in housing or reduce the time they spend on the streets or in temporary accommodation.

The prince told an audience ‌at London Tech Week that it was an "unusual conversation" for a technology forum, but the types of data companies handled daily could give insights that made a real difference. "I'm not sure you realise ‌how much that data can be used to predict and see problems with potential homelessness ‌before they arise," he said.

Homelessness has long been an important cause for the prince, and three years ago he set up the "Homewards" project with the aim of making the problem "rare, brief and unrepeated". The programme launched its Homelessness Data ⁠Lab ​at Tech Week in partnership ⁠with LandAid and Salesforce, supported by Bloomberg, VodafoneThree, Accenture, NatWest Group and others.

The lab will analyse data to ⁠flag warning signs - such as a missed bill payment, a phone being cut off or a child absent from ​school - to intervene to reduce homelessness, a problem Homewards said affected more than 430,000 ⁠people in Britain. The prince said the data could help identify much earlier when somebody was getting into difficulties, allowing intervention ⁠that ​could help them stay in their homes, jobs and communities.

"Prevention is better than cure," he said, appealing to other companies and organisations to join the 25 already working with the ⁠lab. William was shown an "Economic Wellbeing Explorer" map that uses anonymised data from NatWest to pinpoint homelessness ⁠risks in Lambeth, London, ⁠one of the six locations Homewards works in.

"It's game-changing stuff," he told Tim Siret, an analyst at Smart Data Foundry, a subsidiary of ‌the University of ‌Edinburgh, which created the explorer.