Clue Connect Live 2025: A community taking action to protect society

Clue Connect Live 2025 brought together hundreds of professionals from 125 organisations for the largest Clue community event to date. Attendees from policing, regulation, safeguarding, sport, environmental protection, corporate security and more explored how intelligence and investigation teams can respond to increasingly fast-moving, complex and cross-sector threats. 

The opening message was clear. Today’s challenges, whether harm, fraud, exploitation or organised criminal activity, are more networked and harder to detect than ever. Meeting them requires connected intelligence, consistent practice and tools that help teams turn information into confident, timely action. 

Throughout the day, speakers, customers and Clue product experts demonstrated how organisations are using the application to work faster, collaborate more effectively and deliver measurable outcomes that protect people, institutions and critical systems. 

Opening reflections on a shared purpose

CEO Clare Elford opened the event by acknowledging the growing complexity of the threat landscape and the pressure this places on intelligence and investigation teams. She noted that organisations are expected to deliver more with less, and that the nature of harm is changing in ways that demand faster insight, joined up working and consistent operational standards. 

Clare emphasised that while Clue delivers market-leading technology, its real power comes from the community around it, which shares learning, evolves best practice and strengthens collective capability. She highlighted the expanding range of sectors now using Clue, from policing and economic crime to sport integrity, environmental protection and safeguarding. 

“Our role is to make your work easier, to help you be as efficient and confident as possible, and to make the biggest impact,” Clare said. She reinforced that the mission uniting the community is shared across every organisation present: preventing harm and protecting the people and systems that society depends on. 

Advancing intelligence-led operations with AI

A major announcement at this year’s event was the advancement of Clue’s latest AI capabilities, a suite of features designed to help teams extract insight faster while maintaining accuracy, compliance and evidential integrity. 

The latest AI features, arriving in the upcoming software release, include: 

• AI-assisted watchlists that surface new intelligence relating to people or organisations of interest 
• AI-assisted triage that extracts names, locations and organisations from unstructured text 
• Record subscriptions that alert users when information changes on key records 

The design remains deliberately human in the loop. AI supports professional judgement rather than replacing it. As Chief Strategy Officer Thomas Drohan explained, “Without structured data, and domain and workflow expertise, AI is just hype.” 

Beyond AI, the product keynote outlined significant improvements across usability, case management, workflow automation, reporting and integration. Clue now releases updates every six weeks, three times faster than the previous year, enabled by team growth and the use of AI internally to accelerate development. 

Strengthening our community with new initiatives

Clue announced three new initiatives designed to support collaboration and consistency across sectors: 

• Threat Insight Group, connecting teams working on harm areas such as insider risk, professional enablers, and economic crime 
• Best Practice Library, publishing community-developed templates, processes and configurations 
• Developer Centre, enabling secure integrations and helping organisations build connected intelligence ecosystems 

These initiatives support scalable, repeatable practice across the community. 

Customer stories showing intelligence making an impact

Several organisations shared how Clue is helping them modernise operations and deliver real-world outcomes. 

Maritime and Coastguard Agency described how Clue has helped unify fragmented workflows and strengthen evidence handling. Results include a rise in lifejacket compliance among commercial fishers from 5% to 55%, targeted interventions that avoided prosecutions, £400,000 recovered through enforcement activity and consistent CPIA-compliant evidence handling. 

Companies House demonstrated how Clue is supporting its shift from a passive register to an active regulator. Achievements include the removal of thousands of fraudulent entities, early identification of high-risk incorporations, faster cross-agency information sharing and strengthened auditability. 

Tesco was among several large organisations presenting how Clue is helping standardise investigations across complex operations and support consistent, intelligence-led responses to risk. 

A human lens on justice and trust

Peter Sheridan CBE, Commissioner for Investigations at the ICRIR and former Assistant Chief Constable of the PSNI, reflected on transparency, reconciliation and public confidence in investigations. Drawing on extensive experience during and after the Troubles, he emphasised the importance of truth and accountability, themes that resonated strongly with the community’s shared mission. 

Clue Awards 2025: Celebrating leadership and impact

The event closed with the Clue Awards, recognising individuals and teams who have demonstrated outstanding impact, innovation and collaboration. 

Award winners included: 

• Community: Kath Bennett, Rugby Football Union 
• Rising star: Undisclosed recipient, Scottish Environment Protection Agency 
• Technical innovation: Animal and Plant Health Agency, Intelligence Team 
• Pioneer: Leigh Bratley, Department for Education Counter Extremism Team 
• Impact: Maritime and Coastguard Agency, Regulatory Compliance Investigation Team 

Five organisations also marked ten years with Clue. Read more about the Clue Awards winners and shortlisted.  

Looking ahead

As Clue moves into 2026, the community continues to grow, the AI roadmap is expanding, and product development is accelerating. The year ahead will see even more capability to help organisations uncover risk earlier and act with confidence. 

Clue Connect Live 2025 highlighted an essential message. When organisations share knowledge and work together, intelligence becomes action, and that collective action helps protect people and strengthen society.