Executive summary
Government agencies face unprecedented investigative challenges. Data volumes grow exponentially, fraud patterns evolve constantly, and public expectations for transparency have never been higher. Traditional search-driven tools can no longer keep pace. Investigators spend countless hours on routine data gathering — time that should be devoted to analysis and strategic decision-making.
Thomson Reuters CLEAR Investigate transforms this reality through three core principles — simplified experience with AI that works for you, accelerated investigations backed by industry-best data sources, and compliance-ready outputs built for data protection and trust. This purpose-built platform integrates advanced agentic AI capabilities with the trusted CLEAR environment government agencies have relied on for years, delivering intelligent workflows that augment human expertise.
The results are compelling. Government agencies using CLEAR Investigate report a 47% reduction in investigative research time, transforming work that once took hours into tasks completed in minutes. This efficiency gain doesn't compromise quality or oversight. By automating routine data gathering and connection analysis, CLEAR Investigate's agentic AI capabilities free investigators to focus their expertise where it matters most. Investigators can apply professional judgment, validate findings, and determine next steps. Every action is logged and traceable. Every insight is grounded in verified sources. Every investigation maintains the defensibility and professional standards your agency demands.
The challenge: When traditional tools can't keep pace
Government agencies navigate an increasingly complex investigative landscape. Data volumes have grown exponentially across public records and open-web sources, creating an overwhelming information environment. A single criminal investigation might require searching person records, address histories, phone numbers, vehicle registrations, business associations, adverse media, and court records — each conducted separately, each requiring manual correlation. Missing persons' cases demand rapid data access on whereabouts when every minute counts. Program integrity investigations into Medicaid fraud, SNAP benefits, or unemployment claims require pattern analysis across thousands of records. Financial crime investigations need comprehensive entity relationship mapping to uncover connections.
The cost is measured in missed opportunities. Limited resources mean fewer cases are thoroughly investigated. Time pressure forces breadth over depth. Manual processes introduce risks — typos in search terms, incorrect data entry, or overlooked relationships. Meanwhile, accountability expectations are rising. Court proceedings demand comprehensive audit trails. Regulatory agencies require transparent documentation. Professional standards mandate source verification. Public oversight demands both efficiency and integrity.
Traditional search tools excel at retrieving specific records when you know what you're looking for. But they can't autonomously explore connections, identify patterns across sources, or adapt strategies based on discoveries. They provide data access but leave analysis, synthesis, and relationship mapping to human investigators — precisely where AI assistance delivers greatest value.
AI amplifies human expertise
The solution lies in a partnership between AI capabilities and human investigators — one that leverages the strengths of both. AI excels at searching vast datasets rapidly, identifying patterns across thousands of records, maintaining perfect consistency in repetitive tasks, and documenting every action with precision. Human investigators excel where AI cannot — applying nuanced judgment, understanding context and intent, making strategic decisions in uncertain conditions, and taking accountability for outcomes.
CLEAR Investigate implements this through augmentation, not replacement. Agentic AI capabilities handle routine data gathering and analysis within defined parameters. This ability allows teams to focus on higher-value work like complex case analysis, strategic planning, critical assessment, and application of investigative expertise. The relationship preserves human control at every critical decision point. The agentic AI capabilities surface relevant information and connections, but professionals remain in command. Human judgment guides overall strategy, determines which leads to pursue, validates findings, applies professional standards, and makes final decisions.
This reflects the Thomson Reuters approach to agentic AI capabilities: purpose-built tools designed specifically for professional government use. The agentic AI capabilities support analysis by rapidly handling data-intensive tasks. Practitioners apply professional judgment to interpret findings and determine actions. The result is greater efficiency without compromising trust, professional standards, or accountability that government work demands.
Understanding agentic AI: Beyond traditional search
Agentic AI capabilities represent a significant evolution beyond generative AI tools. While generative AI responds to prompts by creating content based on patterns learned from training data, agentic AI capabilities apply your investigative objectives, plan multistep workflows to achieve them, and execute permitted tasks within defined parameters — adapting in response to what they discover while maintaining human oversight at critical decision points.
The distinction is fundamental. Generative AI produces text and responses based on statistical patterns. Agentic AI capabilities act within allowed parameters. They plan workflows, execute searches, analyze results, and adjust approaches based on findings. When you ask a generative AI system a question about a subject, it might provide an answer based on its training data. When you ask CLEAR Investigate the same question, its agentic AI capabilities determine what information is needed, identify relevant data sources, gather that information, analyze relationships and patterns, and develop insights based on actual records — adapting the investigative approach as new connections are discovered, while keeping investigators in control to validate findings and direct next steps.
Here's how the process unfolds. You provide an initial investigative objective — perhaps a question about an individual, a request to map connections between subjects, or a query about an entity. The agentic AI capabilities analyze your objective to determine what information is needed to provide a comprehensive answer. They identify which data sources are most relevant — person records, business registrations, court documents, adverse media, or some combination. As results arrive, the capabilities analyze findings to identify patterns, relationships, and connections. They may discover information suggesting additional searches would be valuable — perhaps finding an address that should be cross-referenced, or identifying an associate whose records might reveal further connections—and adjust the investigative approach accordingly, presenting recommendations for your review and approval.
This makes agentic AI capabilities ideal for supporting the complex investigations government agencies conduct daily. These investigations include criminal cases requiring comprehensive subject background and associate networks, fraud detection demanding pattern analysis across multiple sources, connections analysis to establish relationships between subjects, program integrity investigations requiring evidence gathering across diverse record types, missing persons cases needing rapid relationship mapping, and financial crime investigations seeking critical connections between entities. Throughout the process, investigators maintain control to validate findings, assess significance, and determine which leads to pursue.
The comprehensive toolset
CLEAR Investigate's agentic AI capabilities access a comprehensive suite of investigative tools integrated within the CLEAR platform. The person search and comprehensive reports capability allows the platform to locate individuals and retrieve detailed background information. Business search and entity analysis enables investigation of commercial entities, corporate structures, and relationships. Phone and vehicle searches help establish connections through shared contact information or assets. Access to arrest and incarceration information provides critical background for criminal investigations.
Adverse Media with Sanctions screening surfaces reputational concerns, legal issues, and regulatory flags. Global Beneficial Ownership (GBO) data reveals corporate ownership structures and critical relationships between entities. Web and social media searches extend investigations beyond traditional public records to include current online presence. The Open Web Search capability gathers information from the broader internet when relevant. Advanced connections tools include Associate analytics charts that visualize relationship networks, Graphical Displays that map complex entity relationships, and Company Family Trees that reveal corporate hierarchies and ownership structures.
Beyond basic search, the platform provides enhanced capabilities. Entity Identification uses details beyond standard search fields to identify the correct subject even when only partial or ambiguous information is available, reducing false positives. Follow-up questions allow you to continue an investigation without pivoting away from insights already uncovered. Recommended Next Steps leverage AI analysis to suggest tailored investigative actions based on what has been discovered, keeping you in control to review and approve recommendations. Tailored Answers eliminate the need to page through lengthy reports — ask a direct question and receive a direct answer with source citations. Full Export capabilities provide complete documentation, including a summary of the investigation, the complete conversation, a comprehensive audit trail showing all searches the agent ran, and copies of all source documents — meeting professional and legal standards.
CLEAR Investigate: Purpose-built for government
Government agencies face mounting pressure to work faster and manage growing volumes of data with limited resources. Thomson Reuters CLEAR Investigate is designed specifically to meet these challenges. Built on the trusted CLEAR platform infrastructure that government customers have relied on for years, CLEAR Investigate enhances this proven foundation with agentic AI capabilities that go far beyond simple search or question-answering.
The platform combines autonomous investigative workflows, comprehensive public-records data and open-web sources, and transparent audit trails to support investigators from the moment a question arises through final case resolution. By integrating trusted content, explainable AI actions, and professional-grade controls, it delivers a new standard for how government professionals conduct investigations — accelerating analysis while preserving the oversight, accountability, and compliance that government work demands.
The CLEAR foundation
CLEAR Investigate operates within the proven CLEAR platform environment, leveraging years of development and customer trust. This foundation provides comprehensive public records access spanning federal, state, and local sources. Advanced entity resolution technology reduces duplicates and consolidates information about the same individual or business that appears across multiple records — a critical capability when public records use varying name formats, addresses, and identifiers. The platform integrates open-web data alongside traditional public records, enabling investigations that span both authoritative government sources and the contemporary digital environment.
Key benefits for government agencies
Government agencies using CLEAR Investigate report measurable improvements in investigative efficiency and effectiveness. The platform delivers a 47% reduction in research time, transforming investigative work that previously required hours into tasks completed in minutes. This dramatic acceleration comes from agentic AI-powered workflows that plan multistep searches, execute them across relevant sources, analyze results for patterns and connections, and surface insights — automating routine tasks while maintaining human oversight for validation and direction.
Trusted data quality ensures every insight rests on transparent sources users can review. The comprehensive public records ecosystem, combined with advanced entity resolution, provides confidence that results are defensible. Human-in-the-loop control maintains investigator authority over all judgment. The agentic AI capabilities accelerate discovery and suggest options, but investigators validate findings, assess significance, and determine actions based on their professional judgment and expertise.
Actionable insights go beyond simple search results to provide investigative intelligence. The agentic AI capabilities surface connections between subjects, identify patterns across records, flag potentially significant relationships, and suggest logical next steps based on what has been discovered for investigator review and validation. Compliance-ready outputs with complete audit trails meet the rigorous documentation standards government agencies require. Every action taken by the agentic AI capabilities is logged with a timestamp and source attribution. This comprehensive documentation supports court proceedings, regulatory review, quality assurance, and professional standards compliance.
The platform minimizes data overload by eliminating duplicative records, filtering irrelevant information, and presenting only results that directly address investigative queries. Where traditional searches might return hundreds of records requiring manual review, CLEAR Investigate analyzes results and surfaces specifically what matters.
As one school district investigator noted, "I have really appreciated the conclusions and summaries, as well as the suggestions for next steps that I may take to further my search. In addition, I appreciate the history function and the ease of finding past information vs. running another search."
Government use cases: Accelerating missions
Criminal investigations
Law enforcement agencies use CLEAR Investigate to accelerate investigations while maintaining comprehensive audit trails for court proceedings. The platform rapidly establishes connections between individuals through shared addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations, and known associates. For major investigations, the agentic AI capabilities conduct thorough record reviews across sources, compiling comprehensive subject reports for investigator analysis. Connection analysis discovers shortest paths between subjects through common addresses, phone numbers, or mutual associates. Comprehensive documentation generates defensible research trails with complete source attribution.
Program integrity
Agencies responsible for public programs use CLEAR Investigate to support investigations into potential fraud and abuse. Applications include Medicaid fraud investigations analyzing provider activity — such as service deliverers or vendors submitting claims or transactions — unemployment fraud detection examining suspicious claims, and tax fraud analysis identifying anomalous financial patterns. The solution helps investigators handle significantly more cases with the same resources by reducing time spent on routine data gathering.
Missing persons
CLEAR Investigate provides rapid access to connection information across multiple data sources. The platform conducts comprehensive analysis across current and historical addresses, searches phone numbers and contact information, maps known associates and family connections, and identifies recent activities based on available records.
Fraud detection and financial crime
Government investigators examining financial fraud benefit from agentic AI-powered analysis across sources. The platform helps research subjects comprehensively. It can identify business affiliations and ownership structures, locate assets including property and vehicles, and map relationships between individuals and entities that may reveal coordinated schemes — with investigators validating findings and determining investigative priorities.
Intelligence analysis and regulatory compliance
Intelligence analysts use CLEAR Investigate for pattern recognition across sources supporting criminal intelligence operations. Regulatory investigators use the platform for automated investigation of potential violations with audit-ready documentation generation and complete research trails for regulatory review.
Trust, compliance, and professional standards
Government agencies operate under stringent requirements. CLEAR Investigate is designed from the ground up to meet these demands.
Role-based access controls
Granular permissions ensure each user accesses only information appropriate to their position. Agencies configure access based on organizational structure and policies. Every access to data is logged with user identification, timestamp, and purpose. Access controls prevent users from accessing sensitive information outside their authorized scope.
Comprehensive audit trails
Every action taken by the agentic AI capabilities is logged, creating complete audit trails supporting regulatory compliance, legal proceedings, and professional standards. The system captures every search query, data source accessed, workflow executed, result retrieved and analyzed, connection identified, and user interaction. This documentation serves court proceedings, regulatory compliance, professional standards adherence, internal quality assurance, and training purposes.
Source transparency
Every data point includes attribution to its source. Users see exactly which record provided each piece of information. Clear indicators show when data was collected. Multiple sources providing the same information are shown separately. Advanced entity resolution consolidates information while maintaining transparency about which records were consolidated.
Security and data protection
Robust authentication ensures only authorized users access the system. Encryption protects data during transmission and storage. CLEAR Investigate meets federal, state, and local data protection requirements. For law enforcement, CJIS compliance ensures the appropriate handling of criminal justice information. The platform operates within the proven CLEAR environment that government agencies have trusted for years.
Why CLEAR Investigate leads the market
Professional-grade vs. consumer AI
While consumer AI tools provide general assistance with appropriate safeguards for their use cases, CLEAR Investigate is purpose-built for professional government investigations with specialized requirements. Key distinctions include design specifically for investigative workflows, access to comprehensive public records rather than general internet content, built-in audit trails for legal defensibility, compliance controls including role-based access and data protection meeting government standards, defensible outputs meeting legal and regulatory requirements, and responses grounded in specific data sources rather than statistical predictions.
Integrated vs. add-on solutions
CLEAR Investigate operates directly within the CLEAR platform agencies already use. There's no separate system, no different interface to master, and no workflow disruption. AI capabilities enhance familiar workflows. All tools access the same comprehensive data ecosystem. Agencies manage access and compliance through unified administration. This integration dramatically reduces complexity and administrative burden compared to separate tools requiring coordination across multiple systems.
Comprehensive solution
CLEAR Investigate provides complete investigative ecosystem coverage within a single platform. From initial queries through relationship mapping to final documentation, the platform supports complete workflows. Criminal investigations, program integrity research, fraud detection, missing persons cases, and intelligence analysis all benefit from the same capabilities. The platform draws on Thomson Reuters complete data portfolio, including comprehensive public records, global beneficial ownership, adverse media and sanctions screening, and web and social media sources. This comprehensive approach means fewer situations where investigators must turn to alternative sources.
Thomson Reuters 150-year heritage of serving professional information needs provides confidence that the partnership will continue supporting agencies long-term. Investment in the platform delivers enduring value rather than being tied to narrow point solutions that may become obsolete.
Preparing your agency for the future
The investigative challenges government agencies face will intensify. Data volumes will continue growing, making manual approaches unsustainable. Fraud schemes will grow more sophisticated. Public expectations for transparency will increase pressure to deliver more with existing resources. Agencies that adopt AI-enhanced tools now will build institutional expertise and operational capabilities required for the next decade of investigative work.
Thomson Reuters supports this future with Fiduciary‑Grade AI™ — technology designed for professionals who must stand behind their conclusions. By combining advanced AI with authoritative data, strong governance, and auditable workflows, Fiduciary‑Grade AI helps agencies accelerate investigations while preserving accuracy, explainability, and defensibility.
CLEAR Investigate enables this balance by enhancing proven workflows rather than replacing them, maintaining rigorous professional standards while improving efficiency, providing transparency and accountability that public oversight requires, and delivering measurable improvements without disrupting ongoing operations. This approach lets agencies modernize at sustainable pace without risk and disruption of dramatic overhauls.
Take the next step with CLEAR Investigate
The future of government investigations combines agentic AI capabilities with human expertise and professional judgment. Thomson Reuters CLEAR Investigate delivers this future today — proven technology that accelerates investigations while maintaining the oversight, accountability, and defensibility your agency demands.
Government agencies already using CLEAR Investigate report transformative results. Findings include a 47% reduction in investigative research time, more complete investigations despite limited resources, improved accuracy through comprehensive connection analysis, comprehensive audit documentation meeting the highest legal standards, and greater investigator satisfaction from focusing expertise on analysis rather than routine data gathering.
The opportunity is clear. Agencies that adopt AI-enhanced capabilities now will build organizational expertise delivering compounding advantages over time. The alternative — waiting while complexity grows and constraints tighten — becomes less viable each year.
Ready to transform your investigative capabilities?
CLEAR Investigate provides the intelligent automation your team needs without compromising the professional standards your mission requires. Built on Thomson Reuters 150 years of trusted content, enhanced with the latest agentic AI capabilities, integrated within the familiar CLEAR platform, and designed specifically for government requirements, CLEAR Investigate represents the most comprehensive AI investigative platform available to government agencies today.
Discover how CLEAR Investigate can help your agency:
- Accelerate investigations from hours to minutes through autonomous AI workflows
- Uncover unknown connections faster with advanced relationship mapping
- Act with greater confidence backed by comprehensive audit trails and source transparency
- Build expertise in AI-powered workflows that will serve your agency for years
- Modernize operations while maintaining professional standards and public trust
Visit CLEAR Investigate to learn more and schedule a demonstration customized for your agency's specific investigative needs.
