Our CEO spent two hours delivering a remote session for the RJC’s 2026 CPD Symposium, covering where AI helps in restorative work, and where it has no business being.
On Monday 13 July, our CEO Darren Edwards delivered a remote session for the Restorative Justice Council’s CPD Symposium, called AI and the Future of Restorative Justice. The symposium ran across the week and offered twelve hours of CPD to practitioners around the UK. This was the only session dedicated to AI.
The session was aimed at practitioners and service managers, with a mix of experience with AI among attendees. It covered how AI works, practical use cases for AI in restorative justice, data protection, and the ethical questions services need to think about.
The core message was: “AI for the paperwork. Never for the person.” Restorative justice is built on relationships, trust and people being properly heard, and AI cannot do any of that. It can’t sit across from a young person and mean it, and it has no idea what a silence in a room weighs. Everything sitting around that relationship is a different matter, though. The notes, the reports, the risk assessments, the monthly returns: that’s where it can give you time back.
The session explained how AI works in practical terms, and what practitioners need to consider when using it day to day.
A number of practical use cases were demonstrated using a made-up case, including taking handwritten case notes and using AI to transcribe and decipher them, using AI as a sounding board on a stuck case, building a risk assessment prompt from scratch, and turning exported case data into a working dashboard.
The session covered the data protection basics for using AI with participant information: using a paid version, checking that training on your inputs is switched off and getting that confirmed in writing, and removing names and identifying detail before pasting anything into a tool. Where that can’t be confirmed, the advice is to treat the tool as public.
The session also covered the ethical questions around AI use: bias in training data, being open about when AI has been used, consent around recording, and the environmental and human costs behind AI tools. Attendees were encouraged to think about these through a restorative lens: who is affected, what’s the harm, and what would putting it right look like.
“AI can draft, summarise and analyse. What it can’t do is hold a restorative conversation, read a room, or build trust with someone who’s been harmed. The relationship is still the heart of this work.”
Darren Edwards, CEO, ConnektivityConnektivity provides myRJ, the case management system used by restorative services across the UK, and has been building software for organisations using machine learning and AI for over twenty years.
If you’re wondering how any of this might work in your service, we’re happy to talk it through.
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