UK city-dwellers may have spotted a strangely shaped car cruising around their neighbourhood earlier this year. It looks just like a Google Street View vehicle, with a camera rig emerging from the back end to scan its environment – and like the Google cars, it, too, is scanning and photographing city streets. But these modified Teslas aren't just taking photos. They are kitted out with state-of-the-art sensors and scanners that enable them to report back on the exact dimensions, heat loss, materials, age and state of dilapidation of every building they drive past. Armed with this so-called built environment scanning system (BESS), the cars have been on the hunt to find out how leaky and run-down the UK's building stock really is.

The past two years of the pandemic have been marked by a period of rapid technological change. Amidst supply chain disruptions and changes in consumer behaviours, organisations have turned to digital transformation strategies to stay agile and resilient. The COVID-19 crisis has made it clear that technology is the lynchpin of organisational resilience and agility. As the pandemic disrupted global supply chains, forced employees to work from home and triggered a massive shift of consumer behaviour to online channels, digital technologies have played a pivotal role in keeping organisations afloat. According to Google's State of the API Economy 2021, digital transformation was the leading business imperative of 2020, based on a survey of 700 IT decision-makers from around the world.

Chatbots for housing associations have the potential to reshape an entire industry through automation and conversational AI. Here's what to expect from this paradigm shift. The Addison Act of 1919 introduced subsidising housing and making it affordable to those who need help the most. With national fervour high following the end of the First World War, Parliament set the ambitious target of financing the construction of 500,000 homes in just three years. Fast forward to today, approximately 3.98 million households across the country in 2020 are socially renting -- the highest number since 2000.