“Why do you need a navigation anyway?”
How Combat Stress put AI at the forefront, and what a veteran taught the team during testing.
Combat Stress is the UK’s leading Armed Forces mental health charity.
It provides life-changing, proven treatment for veterans from every service. Its website is where many veterans find themselves when they first start to look for help.
Where it runs
combatstress.org.uk, the charity’s public website.
Delivered by
This Company, the digital agency that founded copadre.
What’s running
A team of agents, including a website helper, a contact handler and a research librarian.
Live since
September 2026, with the launch of the new website.
What it replaces
A subscription-based website search service.
Who visits
Veterans, their families, supporters and fundraisers, researchers and professionals.
“We need to do something with AI”
It all started in 2025 at the Soldiering On Awards in London, where Combat Stress and This Company were celebrating a win for technological innovation. Talk around the table soon turned to what might win in 2026, and at least one voice said what you may well be hearing in your own organisation: we need to be doing something with AI.
For a charity whose visitors may be arriving at a difficult moment, the question was what a sensible first step would look like: it needed to be useful, safe and able to grow.
Starting simple
The first agent many people build is a website helper — trained on website content and capable of answering questions. Combat Stress started here, and added a contact handler agent trained to take a message and collect contact details. Both agents were then put in a cluster with a concierge routing visitors to the right agent.
As a bonus at launch, Combat Stress was also able to add an agent trained to act as a research librarian for its archive of research papers, helping academics to locate relevant papers and explore topics.
Being careful with visitors
If a visitor says they are struggling, the agent responds warmly and signposts the Combat Stress Helpline, 999 and Samaritans, so that a person in difficulty is always pointed towards real people. Agents are there to help visitors find out about Combat Stress, not to replace regulated healthcare services.
The agents are trained to answer only from the knowledge given to them. They respond sounding like Combat Stress, in Combat Stress’s own words, and never like they belong somewhere else.
Lowering barriers
During development of its new website, Combat Stress asked five veterans from different backgrounds to perform basic tasks and report back on how easy or hard it was to use.
One participant struggled to get onto the site at all. Once he was on, he did something none of the others did. He typed every task into the assistant on the homepage. He bypassed the navigation, he completed all of the tasks successfully, and he gave scores of five stars for every task. At the end of the session he asked:
“Why do you need a navigation anyway? Just use the AI assistant on the front page.”
Every website is different and, each time we visit a new one, it can take a moment to figure out where things are. For some people it takes more than a moment but there is usually one thing that everyone recognises and understands — the search box. For someone who isn’t confident online, typing into a box and clicking “submit” is one skill they have and it is all they need to interact with a chat assistant.
By putting an AI assistant in front of its website content, Combat Stress has improved access and lowered barriers that, in the past, might have been the difference between a veteran finding help and giving up.
One less thing to pay for
The website used to rely on a paid search service to index the archive of research papers. The research librarian now does that job. So, as the charity sets its budgets for the year ahead, the $720 search service is a line it is happy to leave out.
Integrating website and agent
Combat Stress regularly publishes research on its WordPress website. The research librarian in copadre needs to know about any new papers that are published. Keeping it current could easily have become a job for a person to manage.
By integrating WordPress with copadre, using an XML output from WordPress, the copadre MCP server and a scheduled task in Claude, This Company automated the process. Every day, the task compares the research library on the website with what the research librarian knows and adds anything new. When the team publishes a paper in WordPress they know that, within a day, the agent will be fully up to date.
It’s only the beginning
Combat Stress now has a firm footing in AI and work has already begun on additional agents to serve a number of new purposes.
One ambition is to deploy an agent to help veterans through the registration process, providing a new channel for self-registration. This type of agent would handle personal information, so due diligence is being done to ensure it would meet data protection requirements.
Beyond helping visitors and veterans, the team is also looking at creating agents for internal systems, to help staff access support directly in their apps rather than having to contact the service desk.
A year ago the ambition was to do something with AI. Today Combat Stress is managing a team of agents, it has a clear view of what it wants next, and it has the tools and confidence to do it.
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