CoCounsel recently reached one million users, and while that number matters, it’s not the story of rainbows and unicorns you might expect.
It is not simply a marker of adoption or growth. It is a sign of trust. One million professionals chose to trust Thomson Reuters in transforming how they work. They chose to test and learn to rely on something new, and to integrate AI into moments that matter. Each one represents a small but meaningful act of transformation: a lawyer who found an hour back in their day, a tax professional who turned research into insight, a compliance officer who had the right information at exactly the right moment. Those moments are why we build.
But if I’m being honest, one million is not enough. We are winning the professional AI market for legal, tax, and compliance—but we are not dominating it. Not yet. And the gap between those two things is what propels us forward.
Transformation Is a Journey, not a Headline
If you have ever tried to change something fundamental—a process, a company, or a mindset—you know transformation is rarely clean or linear. It is messy. It is slow. It is full of hard conversations and rainy days when true north is hard to find and progress feels elusive.
At Thomson Reuters, we have experienced all of that. What we have learned is that progress compounds when you keep showing up, block out the noise, and stay anchored to the mission.
Over the past two years, we have been transforming from a historically content-driven company into an AI-powered technology company. That shift takes more than shipping features or adopting new tools. It requires unlearning deeply ingrained habits, questioning long-held assumptions, and building the courage to change how decisions get made.
My role as CTO is to see where change needs to happen, incite it, and steer it—while also setting the guardrails and tripwires that keep us from going off the rails. Our teams’ role is to push against those boundaries and show us when they need to move. That tension between rigor and exploration is where innovation happens.
Creating Sparks of Change
We see that tension manifests most clearly in how change happens. Transformation does not come from large committees or perfect plans. It comes from small, empowered teams making focused progress.
Across Thomson Reuters, those teams have been the catalysts of change. They moved quickly, tested boldly, learned fast, and shared what worked and what did not. Their work is often unglamorous and invisible, but it is the reason this transformation is real.
They are also the reason CoCounsel exists. They turned agentic AI from a bold idea into something nearly a million professionals now use in their daily workflows.
Building Trust from the Inside Out
One of the most important lessons we learned early is that trust cannot be layered on after the fact. It has to be engineered into the system.
Two years ago, we launched AI Assisted Research—the first generative AI feature in Westlaw. We had a vision of what good looked like, but the reality taught us that defining ‘good’ in generative AI is an iterative process, not a one-time decision.
What felt strong in our research loops needed refinement when put to the test with real human feedback. Legal professionals expected both the precision they relied on and the fluency they were beginning to experience elsewhere. Each round of feedback sharpened our understanding. Each deployment taught us something new about where the bar needed to be.
Those months were challenging, but they were also formative. The conversations with customers and with each other—the honest ones about what was working and what wasn’t—made our AI more reliable and reshaped how we think about accountability in AI systems. We learned how to build solutions with high trust. And in building trust, slow became fast.
But over time, this focus on trust created trade-offs we hadn’t fully anticipated. Every verification layer we added, every human review checkpoint, every conservative threshold—they made our AI trustworthy. But they also made us less versatile, less ambitious. More precise, but less fluid. More reliable, but less delightful.
We optimized for never being wrong. Our users wanted us to also optimize for being genuinely helpful.
From Vendor to Partner
Understanding that gap changed how we think about our relationship with customers. We do not want to be another vendor with a product. The world does not need more vendors.
What professionals want, and deserve, is a partner. A partner who listens, adapts, and is honest when something does not work. A partner who understands that trust is earned slowly and lost quickly.
This next phase of our transformation is about moving from transactional relationships to true partnerships. It is about building tools with our customers, not just for them, and meeting them where they are in their own transformation journeys.
Looking Ahead
One million users proves we are trusted. What it doesn’t prove yet is that we’ve built the AI professionals genuinely want to use—not just the one they know won’t fail them.
That’s what comes next. We’re keeping the trust we’ve earned while closing the gap on experience. Being both precise and ambitious. Both reliable and delightful.
This is harder than what we’ve done so far. It means moving faster without cutting corners. Being bolder without being reckless. Matching the pace of consumer AI without abandoning professional standards.
But here’s what I know: the teams who evolved AI Assisted Research into Westlaw Deep Research—the industry’s most advanced legal research system—and who built CoCounsel into something a million professionals rely on—they’re not done. We’re not done.
