Matt Lambert is Managing Director of Street Support Network, a charity connecting local people and organisations in order to support those who need it the most. The network provides an online hub to find out about homelessness, what support is available and what you can do to help. We talk to Matt about Street Support AI, a staged approach for bringing AI into your organisation, and how 2026 is going to be the year charities start to realise that AI is the direction we’re all heading.
1. Can you tell us more about Street Support and what’s led you to explore AI?
I’ve been in senior management of homelessness organisations for more than a decade but took a sabbatical when we adopted our second child. With time on my hands, I wanted to enhance my skills and bring something new to the table. An opportunity arose to develop personally, so I retrained in AI – not because I loved tech, but because I wanted to learn something that could make a real difference.
Street Support Network was the perfect place to test this. We’re the UK’s largest network connecting people experiencing homelessness to local services and support. Our platform served 53,000 users in 2024, linking people to everything from emergency accommodation to mental health support, job training and food banks. We work with councils, charities and grassroots organisations across 30 locations across the UK to make sure no one falls through the cracks.
AI felt like a natural fit because connection and accessibility are what we do. Connecting solutions is the cornerstone of who we are as a charity. But more than that, adopting AI has created real breathing room for our team to focus on relationships instead of admin. We’ve developed a virtual assistant that helps more people access services and uses data to help us work smarter with partners, but the bigger transformation has been building AI into how we work every day.
2. Can you tell us about Street Support AI?
We offer a staged approach to getting you started with bringing AI into an organisation. Stage 1: Foundations – establishing governance, training your team and building your first custom assistant. Stage 2: Integration – teaching you to build your own tools and embedding AI into how you work every day. Always in that order.
Stage 1 costs £500. The custom assistant is designed to think and sound like you and gets your vision, values and mission. Stage 2 follows, when you’re ready, for £500. We teach you the skills to build your own tools in-house so you can innovate and keep developing what you’re doing.
The real challenge we’re solving is authenticity. Most AI outputs miss the heart of what makes each charity unique. They don’t capture the warmth, the mission-driven passion or the deep understanding that comes from years of working with people who need support. When you’re working with people experiencing homelessness, domestic violence or mental health crises, that authentic voice matters.
The main concern charities have – and our core mission – is helping the third sector retain and amplify its authentic voice. Working out how to make AI sound genuinely charitable rather than like it could have come from anywhere has been the entire journey of developing Street Support AI and integrating AI authentically into the Street Support Network itself.
It is values-led AI that builds capacity while keeping care and compassion at the heart of your work. We’re built by a charity, for charities. We understand the pressures because we’ve lived them. We price it because the work has real value, but at a level that makes these capabilities accessible to nearly every charity. It’s about putting powerful AI tools within reach of small organisations, not just those with big tech budgets.
3. You’re passionate about how governance and skills are key to charities’ successful adoption of AI. What do charities need to consider?
Too many organisations are looking for the right tool instead of focusing on getting the foundations right. They’re asking the wrong questions. They should be thinking about what their pain points are and what might help to make things easier for their people.
The principle that guides everything we do is ‘audit before automate’ – start by understanding what’s really going on before bringing in tools. Here’s the reality: your team members are probably already dabbling with AI tools. Rather than leaving this happening in the shadows, good governance brings it into the open within a safe framework. It’s not about creating barriers or stifling what’s already happening. It’s about giving people proper permission to explore and innovate safely.
We help you build robust policies and tools that are fully compliant and will satisfy your most risk-averse trustee. But these same policies are also permissive and expansive, so people can move from informal experimentation to confident, structured use. This means identifying where AI genuinely helps and where human judgement is non-negotiable. Your team needs to understand their human-only zones like relationship building and safeguarding decisions. But within clear boundaries, they can experiment openly rather than secretly.
You don’t need to be a tech expert. Anyone can learn how to use these simple tools safely and effectively. When your least tech-savvy team member is coming along on the journey confidently, you know the foundations are working.
The policy framework protects what matters most: keeping people and their data safe while enabling your organisation to communicate with its authentic voice. This creates lasting change rather than fragmented experiments that fade away.
4. You’ve recently launched a custom-built AI assistant. What does it involve?
We’ve built what we call ‘Build Your Own Custom AI’, which puts those foundational principles into practice. To build AI that sounds like you, we first need to know what you sound like and be able to codify that into the assistant.
We start by working through your organisational DNA. Who you are, how you communicate, what your values really mean in practice. This isn’t just about tone of voice, it’s about understanding your mission and approach deeply enough to embed it into how the AI processes and responds.
The assistant becomes your organisation’s writing partner. It can draft funding applications that capture your authentic voice, create newsletters that sound genuinely charitable, help with social media posts, support planning documents, or assist with any communication task while maintaining your values and mission throughout. It knows your work context, understands your beneficiaries, and responds in ways that reflect your expertise and compassion.
We handle the technical build for you, creating this custom assistant that’s safe, compliant and covers everything from data protection to charitable code requirements and safeguarding. What you get is something that simplifies access completely. The tool has all the context and background built in, so you don’t need lengthy prompts or complex instructions. It can interpret, analyse and integrate what you’re asking with everything it already knows about you and your organisation in a seamless way.
Instead of creating dependency, we’re building capability. The assistant demonstrates your governance principles in action, so your team can see what good AI looks like before they start experimenting themselves.
5. With 2026 around the corner, how do you think AI will have changed the sector in a year’s time?
2026 is going to be the year charities start to realise this is how we’re going to work. Not the year it all happens overnight, but when it becomes clear that AI isn’t a passing experiment anymore, it’s the direction we’re heading.
My dream is every charity having the capacity to build what they need. Custom tools that fit their specific work, teams who can innovate rather than just survive, organisations with genuine resilience instead of that constant firefighting we’ve all been doing for years. I’ve lived through charity closure during COVID, I know what burnout feels like, I’ve watched brilliant people leave this sector because there wasn’t space to breathe.
But here’s what gets me excited about 2026. That’s when we’ll start evolving in how we work. AI can handle the drudge, the red tape, the endless impact measuring and fundraising admin that’s taken over from what we actually came here to do. Which is helping people and connecting with others who need support.
When I see organisations already transforming, when I watch teams discover they can spend much more time on relationships instead of paperwork, that’s when I know this is starting. When I see the relief on people’s faces when they realise they don’t have to choose between caring for others and drowning in admin, that’s when I know the revolution has begun.
The culture change will take time to embed properly. But we’re closing the gap. Small charities won’t need massive tech budgets to have similar capabilities to the larger organisations. The organisations starting now, building those foundations, they’re going to be ready when this becomes the norm. Because the more time we spend on relationships and care, the more human the work becomes. Adopting AI responsibly and safely will make us more human not less.