University of Portsmouth Higher Education Corporation and Arun and Chichester Citizens Advice Bureau KTP 24_25 R3

Citizens Advice advisers currently spend a significant portion of their time on administrative paperwork instead of helping people with urgent problems like rising energy bills. This project will build an AI-powered platform to automate that paperwork, potentially doubling the number of clients the charity can support. The problem is straightforward: demand for advice is growing faster than the charity can recruit and train volunteers. Advisers spend hours on data entry, case notes, and form-filling—time that could go directly to clients. By automating these routine tasks, the platform aims to free up advisers to focus on complex, high-need cases. The project will initially target energy advice, a high-volume area where clients often face immediate financial hardship. If successful, the platform could be expanded nationwide across other advice areas—debt, housing, benefits—without requiring a proportional increase in staff. The impact would be felt in the quiet infrastructure of social support: shorter wait times, more people helped per adviser, and a system that can scale with demand without burning out its workforce. This is not fundamental science; it is applied engineering of a public service.