TL;DR
Social housing has opened the door to AI faster than its staff have walked through it. In Housemark’s survey of 66 sector professionals, reported by Inside Housing on Wednesday 14 October, only 14% reckoned over half of their colleagues use AI tools weekly or more, while nearly 60% said their landlord had switched access on for all or most staff. Just 21% could point to a demonstrated return on investment. The pattern is the same one Deloitte’s CFO survey, out the same day, found in large companies: expectation and access are running ahead of use.
Access without adoption
Respondents came from councils, arm’s-length management organisations and housing associations. The sector’s most used tools are Microsoft’s Copilot and Azure AI, a finding that matches the trade title’s own summer survey. Seven in ten use AI for reports, communications and writing; data analysis (53%) and then dashboards and reporting (41%) come next, with customer service, predictive modelling and decision support the least common uses.
The organisational picture is early-stage. Only 5% of respondents said their employer was rolling AI out across the organisation, against nearly 40% describing use as individual experimentation. Two-thirds said a formal strategy was planned or in development; 11% said one existed. Housemark has turned the results into a four-stage maturity scale that runs from “experimenting” to “transforming”.
Two-thirds believe AI has added value, mostly as time saved, but only a fifth can show a return. More than half name skills as the biggest barrier to scaling, with data quality, budgets, legacy systems and appetite for risk behind it.
Housemark’s reading
John Wickenden, Housemark’s research manager, called the access-adoption gap one of the research’s clearest findings, and said value only arrives once staff feel confident with the tools and know where they belong in daily work. The organisations seeing consistent adoption, he said, are focusing on their people and on training as much as on the tools. Housemark’s own write-up of the forthcoming whitepaper presses landlords to replace anecdotal time savings with baseline metrics.
The wider pattern
The findings follow a report a day earlier that found supported housing providers far from “AI ready”, and come a day after Resultsense’s report on the social housing regulator’s AI stance. Across the economy, Deloitte’s third-quarter survey found 67% of UK CFOs judging their organisations about a quarter of the distance to the AI transformation they expect, even as 52% expect it to cut headcount within a year. In our view, a small survey of one sector should be read as indicative rather than definitive, but its shape is now familiar: tools bought, use optional, value unmeasured.
Looking forward
Housemark’s full whitepaper has yet to be published. For landlords, its measurable test is simple: whether the 21% with a demonstrated return grows faster than the share with access.