Small social housing providers often face a familiar challenge: stretched teams, tight budgets and urgent operational demands leave little room for trial-and-error with new technologies.
At ECCO, we believe that AI does not have to be a distant ambition. Indeed, it can be a practical asset in your day‑to‑day work. That is why we have aligned with HAILIE (Housing AI Leadership and Implementation Exchange) to bring you tailored, sector‑specific advice which helps you make real progress today.
Why Small Providers Are Poised to Benefit
With fewer than 1,000 homes and no dedicated IT department, smaller registered providers may feel they lack the scale for AI. In fact your nimbleness and close relationships with residents are major advantages.
You can pilot focused AI tools quickly, see what works, and scale up without the bureaucratic hurdles of larger organisations. Whether you need smarter document handling, faster insights from case records or more meaningful tenant engagement, the right AI tool can free up capacity and boost your team’s impact.
Five Practical Steps to Get Started
Based on the first HAILIE session in June 2025 (with insights from Anne Taylor, CEO of Churcher Thorngate Trust, and Guy Marshall, HAILIE Chair) here are five steps tailored for small social housing providers:
- Leverage Existing Policies: You do not necessarily need a separate AI policy. If your data protection and GDPR frameworks are robust, treat AI as another secure tool in your toolkit. Do not let policy paralysis hold you back. Start small, stay compliant.
- Unlock Free Text Data: Many housing or care systems create valuable free text notes but extracting them can be tricky. AI models such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude can generate simple scripts to pull insights from this text, even if your legacy systems do not have fancy APIs.
- Focus on Capability, Not Cost: AI is not always about big budgets. One care provider used AI to analyse incident reports and discovered a link between caffeine and falls, finding that switching to decaf cut falls by 30%. That kind of insight comes from asking the right questions, not from expensive infrastructure.
- Set Clear Governance and Accountability: As powerful AI tools become more accessible, users across your organisation will experiment. That is great, but it also carries risk. Decide who owns AI capabilities in your team, ensure data safeguards are in place (look for “do not use my data for training” settings) and always assign a human sign‑off for AI‑driven decisions.
- Make Experiments Visible: Share your early trials internally and with peers. Even imperfect pilots build momentum, spark ideas and help you learn faster. Record what you try, measure outcomes and feed those lessons back into your approach. And if you are part of HAILIE, log your progress there for extra peer support.
The One‑Take Video and What’s Next
To kick off these steps, we recorded a short one‑take video demo on setting up a custom GPT for housing‑specific tasks. It is simple, fast and shows you exactly how to get started.
We will re‑record once we have gathered more feedback, but in this rapidly evolving landscape, the fundamentals of safe, useful AI will remain your guideposts even as tools change.