Professional work has never happened in a single system. It spans research platforms, drafting tools, document systems, enterprise workflows, customer data, and now a growing set of AI-powered assistants and agentic systems.
For our customers, flexibility is powerful. Work can begin in the environment that is most natural for the task at hand. But it also creates a critical challenge: as work moves across more tools, models, partners, and interfaces, how do professionals keep track of what happened and why? The final output must be accurate, transparent, secure, and defensible. As AI moves from answering questions to planning, acting, and coordinating work across tools, the system behind the interface matters more than ever.
That question is becoming more urgent as AI changes the speed and scale of professional work. The gap between what is plausible and what is correct, between what is fast and what can be trusted, is widening. In legal, tax, audit, and compliance, that gap is not theoretical. It creates real consequences for clients, organizations, markets, and reputations.
At Thomson Reuters, we call the standard required for this work Fiduciary-Grade AI™: AI designed for professionals whose work is subject to regulatory oversight and duties of care and where accuracy, confidentiality, and accountability are critical. In the agentic era, that standard becomes even more important because AI is no longer only generating answers. It is beginning to help plan work, use tools, coordinate steps, and help complete complex tasks. And it is increasingly dependent on many interconnected AI technologies, models, and agents working together to produce a final work product.
That is the standard we are building CoCounsel to, as it evolves into an agentic operating system for the professions we serve.
CoCounsel is designed to meet professionals wherever high-stakes work happens. Often, that means starting and completing work directly in CoCounsel. Increasingly, it also means making CoCounsel accessible across the broader ecosystem of tools, models, platforms, and partners our customers already use.
The goal is simple: put Fiduciary-Grade AI™ at the fingertips of our customers, wherever professional work begins, and ensure that when the work matters, it can be trusted. That is what we mean by an agentic operating system: not a single agent, chatbot, or workflow tool, but a trusted system that can bring together content, context, tools, models, verification, and human oversight to help professionals move work forward.
Starting Work Is Easy. Finishing It Is What Matters.
AI has made it easier than ever to begin work. A prompt can generate a draft, summarize a document, surface a possible answer, or move a task forward in seconds.
But in professional environments, starting work is not the hard part. Finishing it accurately is.
This need is especially visible in legal, where professionals must ground their work in trusted sources and stand behind the results. When work carries consequences, when it needs to stand up in a boardroom, before a regulator, in an audit, or in court, what matters is how that work is grounded, verified, validated, and made defensible.
That is the role CoCounsel is designed to play.
Trust in professional AI cannot be treated as a feature added at the end. It has to be built into the system itself. Outputs must be grounded in authoritative, continuously maintained sources. They must be shaped by domain expertise. They must include mechanisms for validation and transparency, so professionals can understand, verify, and stand behind the results.
This is what separates general-purpose AI from Fiduciary-Grade AI™.
General-purpose AI can be extraordinarily useful for exploration, brainstorming, summarization, and productivity. But high-stakes professional work requires more than a plausible answer. It requires systems that understand the domain, apply trusted sources, respect privacy and security obligations, and support the human accountability that remains at the center of professional judgment.
We are seeing this first in legal. CoCounsel Legal combines advanced AI with Thomson Reuters trusted legal content, workflows, and expertise, including Westlaw, Practical Law and KeyCite, which can be applied to customers’ own documents and work product. It is designed not only to help legal professionals move faster, but to help ensure their work can be trusted when it matters most.
As Elizabeth F. Salsedo-Surovov, Director of Knowledge Management and Information Resources at Robinson & Cole LLP, recently said: “We’re really excited to be using [CoCounsel Legal] Deep Research… we are using it in Westlaw through our partnership with Thomson Reuters, in our on-premise AI environment to pull in the Deep Research reports so that people are not doing research in the ChatGPTs of the world, they’re doing research in Westlaw. … Utilize the trusted resource and tools of Westlaw to do your legal research. Don’t rely on other AI tools.”
That customer perspective captures the shift underway. Professionals are not just asking for faster AI. They are asking for AI they can rely on.
Building Across the Customer’s Ecosystem
The next generation of CoCounsel is being built for that reality.
CoCounsel will continue to be a primary destination for professional work. For many customers and many workflows, the best experience will begin inside CoCounsel itself, where Thomson Reuters can bring together content, workflow, context, AI, and various 3rd party applications and agents in one trusted environment.
But professional work also starts in many other places. It starts in documents, emails, enterprise systems, matter management tools, tax workflows, accounting platforms, customer environments, and increasingly general-purpose AI assistants. That is why we are building CoCounsel to operate across a broader ecosystem as well.
Through APIs, connectors, Model Context Protocol capabilities, and emerging interoperability standards, CoCounsel can be integrated with and invoked from the environments where customers are already working. In legal, we are beginning to demonstrate this through our work with Anthropic and Claude, enabling customers to connect Claude with CoCounsel Legal so that work can move between a general-purpose AI environment and Thomson Reuters trusted legal AI system.
And this is just one part of the broader strategy.
We are engaging across the AI and enterprise technology ecosystem, with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and other partners, to make CoCounsel available where our customers choose to work. Through MCP and other integrations, CoCounsel can be accessed from the environments where customers are already working.
This is not about turning Thomson Reuters into a passive content layer for someone else’s interface. It is about making CoCounsel available as the trusted professional AI system that grounds, validates, and completes high-stakes work, regardless of where that work begins.
The same strategy extends beyond legal. As CoCounsel continues to expand across Thomson Reuters, including tax, accounting, audit, risk, and compliance, we are building toward a future where fiduciary-grade AI is available across the professional workflows our customers rely on every day.
What Comes Next
AI is raising expectations for speed and scale across every professional industry. But as the volume of AI-assisted work increases, so does the pressure on accuracy, judgment, and accountability.
The systems that matter most will not be the ones that simply help professionals start work faster. They will be the ones professionals can rely on to finish work correctly.
That is the future we are building toward with CoCounsel.
We will continue to make CoCounsel a best-in-class destination for professional work. And we will continue to extend it across the ecosystems where our customers are already working, across models, platforms, partners, and workflows.
Because the future of professional AI will not be defined only by who can generate the fastest answer.
It will be defined by which systems professionals can verify, trust, and stand behind.
That is the fiduciary-grade standard we are building into CoCounsel across Thomson Reuters.
