Police chiefs think that cloud-based software Söze could be fed huge quantities of information to help detectives crack unsolved cases.

The system, which refers to criminal mastermind Keyser Söze from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, would allow analysts to draw inferences from the mass of information that they are unlikely to find themselves.

Avon and Somerset police have trialled the tool on 27 cases already. The results showed that the force was able to perform a data structuring analysis in just six hours, five minutes and 55 seconds. Done manually, this work would have taken 81 years, in theory.

Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, told reporters: “I could imagine this sort of thing being really useful for cold case reviews. If there’s a system like this, the software can ingest [case material] and give you an assessment of it. I can see that being really, really helpful in some of the most notorious unsolved crimes out there.”

Söze is one of “dozens of groundbreaking technologies” that police are hoping to use in the coming years.

Mr Stephens said his team had identified “64 current examples of science and innovation that are really helping us move forward”.

“If all of those 64 examples were adopted across England and Wales and had similar gains to what they’ve got in the forces that have used in them, we’d reclaim 15 million hours of productivity back for colleagues to spend on investigations or responding to emergencies; that’s more than £350 million in costs,” he said.