The Retail Trust uses AI personalisation to give each retail worker wellbeing support built for them, at about 50p a night. Poppie Foakes and Tim Walpole explained at aiblLIVE London 2026 how the 60-person charity built what Walpole calls the Netflix of wellbeing.
It started as a crisis phone line that 98% of people never used. After three stages of AI work, 20 to 25% of an organisation now use its services, mostly before they reach crisis.
All figures as stated on stage by Poppie Foakes and Tim Walpole.
To reach millions of retail workers without adding staff. As a crisis phone line, it never reached 98% of people. It wanted to offer everyday wellbeing support to the 3 million people in retail, from sleep to anxiety, while still helping the 2% in crisis. A 60-person charity could not hire its way there.
It builds a model of each person rather than each segment. Every interaction is weighted and time-decayed to judge someone’s wellbeing state. That is combined with demographics and answers to about 10 core questions in a 1024-dimension vector. A two-tower model then matches the person to content, with Netflix-style social proof.
This is a unique set of data just for you with recommendations just for you. I call it the Netflix of wellbeing.
Tim Walpole, Head of Data & Creative Technology, Retail Trust
By putting its data in one place first and proving each stage in weeks. A Databricks lakehouse came first, in 2022 and 2023. Agentic comms took a two-week proof of concept and eight weeks to production. Hyper-personalisation took four weeks to prove and 16 to ship, with a tech team of five or six.
The platform is an optional benefit that retailers provide, and it takes in no personally identifiable information. Every piece of content written for retailers goes through a human in the loop. Responsible AI policies are sponsored from board level down, and Walpole says AI is not yet trustworthy enough for full prediction.
People trust Retail Trust, and as soon as we lose that trust, then we’re lost.
Tim Walpole, Head of Data & Creative Technology, Retail Trust
Poppie Foakes is Director of Product and Innovation at the Retail Trust, the charity for people who work in retail. Tim Walpole is its Head of Data & Creative Technology. They spoke on the Customer track at aiblLIVE London on 20 October 2026.
If you want to personalise support or content at scale on a small budget, this is the model to borrow. The full PDF goes deeper than this page, in the speakers’ own words.
For HR and wellbeing leaders, data and product leads, and charity leaders with big audiences and small teams. Six pages, about a nine-minute read.
