If you’ve got fewer than 1,000 homes and likely no internal IT team, you can still benefit from AI. While you may not have the scale for advanced analytics or large-scale automation, your nimbleness and closeness to residents are major advantages. AI doesn’t need to start with major investment—just a smart use of tools that boost executive bandwidth and support frontline decisions.
After the first HAILIE (Housing AI Leadership and Implementation Exchange) session in June 2025, Anne Taylor (CEO, Churcher Thorngate Trust) and Guy Marshall (HAILIE Chair) put together some initial steps tailored for small registered providers. These are designed to help increase leadership capacity, make better use of limited resources, and ensure small providers are not left behind in the AI wave.
Whether you’re starting with something as simple as better document handling or exploring tenant engagement tools, this guide will show you how to get started, what’s possible, and what’s practical, for organisations like yours.
Some key insights for smaller providers:
- 🛠 You may not need a separate AI policy. If your data protection and GDPR policies are strong, AI can often be used safely as just another tool. Don’t let lack of policy be a blocker—start small, stay compliant.
- 📄 Free text data is an untapped resource. If your housing or care systems are hard to extract from, AI can help. Tools like ChatGPT can generate scripts that unlock your own data—even if your systems aren’t playing ball.
- 🧠 AI is about capability, not cost. A powerful example is from a care provider who used AI to discover that caffeine was a leading contributor to falls. A simple switch to decaf reduced falls by 30%. That insight came not from massive investment, but from asking the right question of the data.
- 🔒 Be mindful of governance. As tools become more powerful and accessible, anyone in your team can use them. That’s both an opportunity and a risk. Ensure your systems are set up to protect data, and decide where AI capability will sit within your organisation. Ensure a human is always accountable.
- 🚀 Start visible, and share progress. Showing you’re experimenting (even imperfectly) can build momentum internally and across the sector. Record what you try, and revisit it as your confidence grows. Share it with HAILIE for bonus points!
“It’s not a money thing: If you want to do something, you can find a way to do it.”
— Anne Taylor, CEO, Churcher Thorngate Trust
The below 10 minute video shows how to get started with a custom GPT in ChatGPT, but it could just as easily be Gemini or Claude. For your purposes they are all very similar. Copilot is slightly worse. All of them can be set up to not allow data out of your organisation: Look for “do not use my data for training”. The video is housing specific
For general tips on AI, rather than write our own, we’d recommend reading the latest posts by Ethan Mollick at Wharton Business School in the US, who does a great job of explaining it. This also covers “deep research” which is great and didn’t make our 10 minute video: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/using-ai-right-now-a-quick-guide
If there is other content or information you would like on this page, or if you are reading this after September 2025 (it is out of date!), please email guy@housingai.org to request updates.
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