Robot investigators may start to be used in fraud cases

Robot investigators could be widely used in future to examine documents in complex cases, the head of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has suggested. David Green said he would like to see the possibility of employing artificial intelligence "carefully examined" after using technology to sift through a cache of 30 million documents disclosed by Rolls-Royce during a major investigation. He also said it was now "pretty clear" that his agency would continue as an independent body after the government dropped plans to have it taken into the National Crime Agency. The SFO director set out how the Rolls-Royce documents had been examined by a computer algorithm which had the ability to learn as it went along. The technology was trying to find legally privileged documents which could not be used in the case, but Mr Green suggested that in future similar methods could be used to identify useful evidence in investigations.