Rebuilding customer contact with AI
Saxon Weald was Commended in the Artificial Intelligence category of the Housing Technology Awards 2026.
Customer contact is one of the most demanding parts of service delivery in our sector. Rising email volumes, complex enquiries and increasing regulatory pressures have made it harder for housing providers to maintain visibility and consistency across all channels. While many organisations have focused on modernising their repairs or rolling out new digital services, the underlying structure of email communication has mostly remained unchanged: fragmented inboxes, inconsistent routing and a heavy reliance on manual triaging.
Saxon Weald recognised these pressures acutely. We were operating 18 separate inboxes, each handling different types of customer enquiries. Email triage was labour intensive, reporting was limited and our staff spent a lot of time copying and pasting information into legacy systems. The result was an incomplete picture of customer contact across our operations.
In short, our teams felt that they only ever had half the story.
To address this challenge, Saxon Weald partnered with Infinity Group, whose experience in housing and Microsoft technologies shaped the design of a more structured approach to email. This required a unified, governed intake layer: a system capable of handling the complexities and nuances of customer communications at scale.
Streamlining complexity with a smart AI assistant
Infinity’s BrikHousing AI Smart Assistant was the answer to what we wanted to achieve. Running entirely within our existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure environment, it restructures the customer contact workflow without automating sensitive interactions.
At the centre of the AI assistant is an AI-driven intake mechanism designed to bring structure to a previously fragmented process. Rather than handling emails across multiple inboxes, all customer communication now enters a single point where the AI assistant interprets and organises each message.
The AI assistant begins by analysing the content of the email to understand what the resident is asking. It identifies the type of enquiry and assigns it to the relevant category using natural language processing (NLP). Once the enquiry has been interpreted, the system draws on existing tenancy and property records to place the message in its proper context. This ensures that staff see the enquiry alongside the information they need, rather than having to retrieve that information manually.
The AI assistant then produces a short summary of the message and notes any indicators of sentiment. This doesn’t replace staff judgement but it does give our teams an immediate sense of tone and urgency. After the message has been categorised and contextualised, the system creates the corresponding case in our housing management platform. The final step is routing: the enquiry is directed to the appropriate team, ready for action without the need for manual triaging.
Building AI confidence
Saxon Weald and Infinity approached AI adoption as an organisational change programme rather than as a technology installation. We both recognised early on that introducing AI into a core customer-facing workflow would only be successful if people understood its role.
Our ultimate aim is to use AI to deal with transactional, non-value-added process parts so we can focus our resources on the things that really matter, such as complex cases and people who need extra support, where a human touch is essential.
Before any configuration began, our two organisations worked together to define a governance model for AI use. This included agreeing clear boundaries around the AI assistant’s role, documenting the decision points it would handle and specifying the areas that would remain exclusively human-led. A clear AI policy and an impact assessment framework was designed to ensure transparency, consistency and ethical use of machine-learning tools.
The partnership placed significant focus on change management. We spent time explaining to our staff how email enquiries would move through the system, how cases would be generated and what information they would now receive automatically. Infinity Group reinforced this with knowledge transfer sessions, ensuring our operational teams understood the logic behind the system, not just its interface.
The operational impact
Introducing the AI-supported intake layer altered several dimensions of our operational landscape.
With more than 1,500 emails processed during the first phase and over 90 per cent accuracy achieved in categorisation and routing, the AI assistant produced a level of consistency that manual triaging couldn’t achieve. This consistency supported more structured workload planning and faster identification of cases requiring escalation.
The removal of manual case creation was another significant operational shift. Previously, staff were required to extract details from emails and enter them into legacy systems (a time-consuming process that also carried a risk of error). The automated creation of cases, pre-populated with contextual data, meant that our frontline teams could move directly to addressing residents’ problems rather than reconstructing the details.
We now have an environment with fewer bottlenecks, more predictable workflows and a clearer understanding of the nature and volume of resident contact.
Positioning AI for the future
Infinity’s ‘adopt, don’t over-customise’ approach means we’re technically equipped for incremental AI expansion. Because the AI assistant operates entirely within Saxon Weald’s existing Microsoft environment, it positions them to participate in the broader shift taking place across our sector.
As housing providers begin moving from isolated automations to more integrated, data-driven decision-making, the value of a structured, governed intake model becomes clearer. Reliable data about customer contact creates downstream opportunities in areas such as complaints forecasting, repairs prioritisation and early risk identification. It lays the groundwork for future AI approaches that depend on high quality, well-organised operational data rather than ad-hoc information scattered across multiple systems.
In this sense, the work done by Saxon Weald and Infinity Group reflects a wider trend; AI adoption in housing is becoming less about experimenting with new tools and more about establishing the foundations that allow those tools to be used responsibly.
By addressing one of the sector’s most pervasive operational challenges, Saxon Weald has created the conditions for more considered, more measured and ultimately more effective use of AI in the years ahead.
Debbie Chun is the executive director of strategy and transformation at Saxon Weald. The housing provider was Commended in the Artificial Intelligence category of the Housing Technology Awards 2026.
