My Churchill Fellowship Project: trusted partnerships and new technology

In 2026 I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship. The project begins with a problem that sounds narrow and turns out to be anything but. Right now in the UK, people are too often asked to choose between their assistance dog and the technology that could help them, at exactly the moment when the real gains come from using both together.

The problem

An assistance dog placed today will work with their person into the mid-2030s. That is a decade of independence, confidence and spontaneity. Over the same decade, assistive technology will change beyond recognition. If the dog and the technology cannot work together safely, the person ends up picking one or the other, and loses something whichever way they choose. My Fellowship is about making sure that choice is not forced on them.

The core question I'm exploring

What sits beneath all of this is a question I have spent my career circling: how do you bring new technology into a relationship built on trust without damaging the trust itself? I've led the science and then the national operation behind guide dog partnerships, so I have seen this question from the inside, on both sides of it.

A guide dog partnership is one of the oldest and most remarkable examples of a trusted relationship we have. It is built on partnership, mutual respect and a deep understanding of each other gained through working and living together. Technology cannot replicate that, and I'd argue it does not need to. What it can do, when introduced with care, is support the partnership by taking on some of the more routine demands of daily life. The challenge is not the technology itself, but how it is introduced. Without an understanding of the relationship already in place, even well-designed technology can end up getting in the way rather than helping.

Why now

Dogs matched today will be working partnerships for up to a decade, and the technology around them is moving faster than at any point in that partnership's history.

The decisions we make now about how dogs and technology work together are not hypothetical. They shape the daily lives of people who are being matched with a dog this year and will still be working with that dog in the 2030s. Disability charities are doing extraordinary work, but they are stretched keeping up with today's demands, let alone the next decade's. The Fellowship gives me the time and the reach to come alongside both the organisations and the people who rely on them, so that everyone can get to the tools that work best for them.

Why these three places

I have chosen three countries, each with a different lesson to teach.

In the USA, people are already combining their guide dog with assistive technology in everyday life, and some assistance dog organisations build technology training into their programmes. I want to hear directly from the people living it, about what genuinely works and what falls down in practice.

In Australia, I want to be in the room with guide-dog trainers, mobility specialists and accessible-technology experts as they troubleshoot in real time, including those revealing moments when the app says go and the dog says no.

In Japan, organisations have already reported changes in the behaviour of assistance dog owners. By working remotely with colleagues there, I hope to understand what they have learnt from those changes and what people with lived experience can teach us.

Why it matters, beyond dogs

In the short term, I want to co-create something practical with people who have a vision impairment: something that solves an immediate problem for guide dog organisations and can then extend across the wider assistance-dog sector, which is wrestling with the same questions. The findings will be published openly in my Fellowship report, so that others can build on them.

The bigger reason this matters is also the reason it connects to the rest of my work. Every charity I speak to is now facing a version of the question the guide dog world is facing. They hold deep, trusted relationships with the people they serve, and powerful new technology is arriving in their organisations faster than anyone planned for.

AI is turning up in case notes, fundraising, safeguarding and frontline support, often before there is any agreement on how it should be used. The temptation is to keep it at arm's length or to adopt it wholesale, and both of those responses carry a cost. I believe the work is to combine the two well: to keep the trusted relationship at the centre and let the technology serve it.

If we can get that right for one of the oldest partnerships there is, a person and their dog, where the stakes are high and the trust is everything, the same principles hold for any charity bringing AI into the lives of the people it supports.

Follow the journey

I will share field notes here as Fellowship Dispatches as the project develops, starting before I travel later this year.

If you are working out how trusted relationships and new technology fit together in your own organisation, whether or not there is a dog involved, I would be glad to have you follow along.

You can read more about the project on my dedicated Churchill Fellowship Project page.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular Fellowship updates and reflections.