An AI assistant for the Palme investigation files

The investigation into the murder of Olof Palme is one of the largest police investigations in the world. Since it was closed in 2020, much of the material can be requested from the police. But it is a huge and messy archive: typed police reports, handwritten notes, maps and photos.

For the investigative podcast Spår, Softwerk built PalmeNet-Chat, an AI tool that lets you search, ask questions about and analyse that archive. The documents come from Palmemordsarkivet, a crowd-sourced archive led by Mattias Kressmark.

Tibo Bruneel tells the whole story, from OCR to the chat, in How we built PalmeNet-Chat on Softwerk AI.

From paper to a searchable library

The first version runs on premises. We built a pipeline that reads the scanned pages with vision language models and turns them into a structured, searchable library. On top of that, a language model answers questions using the documents it finds.

A second, cloud-based version was built together with the Belgian AI company ML6. It uses Deep Research and agent-based language models to analyse large document collections.

Research at Linnaeus University

The work is also research. Tibo Bruneel, an industrial PhD student at Linnaeus University who works at Softwerk, presented it at a DISA seminar on 13 March 2026.

“Digital forensics is no longer just about retrieving data; it’s about making it usable,” he says.

Our CEO Björn Lundsten sees tools like this as a modern way to work with large unsolved cases, much as DNA technology was a few decades ago.

Read more

• Intelligently searching through the Olof Palme archives using an AI powered chat (Softwerk AI)
• 40 years after the Palme assassination: LNU researchers bring new insights with AI (Linnaeus University)
• Växjöbolagets nya verktyg används för att söka efter Palmes mördare (Smålandsposten, in Swedish)
• AI-teknik kan hjälpa till att lösa Palmemordet (Sveriges Radio P4 Kronoberg, in Swedish)