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Get to know Thomson Reuters: our technology journey and what’s next

How well do you know Thomson Reuters? If you’re a legal, tax, or risk professional or C-suite executive, you most likely see us primarily as a trusted information source. You wouldn't be wrong.

In recent years, we have become a leading artificial intelligence (AI) technology development company. What does this shift to a tech-focused information business mean for your professional practice?

As part of our TechConnect series of online video conversations, David Wong, our chief product officer (CPO), and Joel Hron, chief technology officer (CTO) and AI leader, discussed our “journey” as an innovative developer of AI tools, as well as the future directions that journey is likely to take, for both us and the evolving needs of our customers.

What professionals want

Among the practitioners surveyed in the recent Future of Professionals Report, from the Thomson Reuters Institute 77% believe that AI will have a “transformational” or “high” impact within the next five years, with an average of 56% of all professionals’ work expected to incorporate new AI-powered technologies. One of the key ways that respondents see AI tools transforming their practice is streamlining workflows and automating routine tasks so that they can spend more of their time and expertise on work that provides greater value for their firms and for their clients.

Becoming a more tech-focused company isn’t really a change in direction for us. It’s an evolution that has arisen organically from our existing expertise in creating information tools for the professions we have long served.

As Hron puts it, “our human expertise at Thomson Reuters and the level and rigor we put behind the quality of our content and our products for years” are being put to work in the development of AI products.

As a technology company, we are focused upon the development of professional-grade AI. Among other attributes, that term refers to AI tools that are accurate and reliable. The data such tools use must be free from bias and originate from authoritative sources. A professional’s success, after all, is built upon the quality of his or her work. An AI-powered tool for professionals must also establish stringent security measures to protect confidential client data from unauthorized access. This careful handling of data needs to assure both professionals and their clients that the tool conforms to rigorous principles of ethical AI usage.

To accomplish these goals, we have made the human touch a crucial element of our technology development. That human touch provides insight into what a professional truly wants from an AI tool. “Most users, whether they be attorneys, tax professionals, or any other type of user, don’t really care about the technology behind the application,” Hron notes. “They just expect it to work in the way they need it to work.” The “marriage of our technologists and our subject experts,” he adds, allows the company to understand “how the model needs to behave to solve a professional’s problem in a direct way”—without requiring those professionals to become IT experts.

Wong adds that “as we take on harder and harder problems for our customers, the need for subject matter experts who understand how their work is done becomes even more important.”

What’s next?

In 2024, we announced the expanded vision to provide a GenAI assistant for every professional they serve with CoCounsel.

This thinking has informed the development of the newest iteration of CoCounsel. Wong describes it as the “culmination” of the collaborative work that the company’s various teams have conducted during the past year “to build a consistent single AI assistant” for all the professions – legal, tax, accounting, and more – that Thomson Reuters serves. CoCounsel’s broad capabilities, he adds, allow it to “operate like a member of [a professional’s] team.” It also gives any type of professional a user-friendly way to access the company’s broad diversity of products and solutions. “It points [professionals] in the right direction [and] shows how our content, our software, and our AI can help them complete their work,” Wong says.

We have been building and broadening our technology offerings through acquisition as well as internal development. In August 2023, we acquired Casetext, a developer that uses advanced AI and machine learning to build technology for legal professionals. And in October 2024, we purchased Materia, a US-based startup whose AI assistant automates and augments research and workflows for the tax, audit, and accounting professions.

The acquisition of Materia “is a reinforcement of our belief in [getting] AI assistants into the hands of every professional,” Hron says. “Tax and audit really lend themselves to workflow-oriented tasks, and the technology when used in that way is really proficient to those kinds of skills and capabilities.” We will be folding in the Materia development team’s expertise into its own as it tailors its AI tools for use in specific workflow end-use cases.

Given the highly competitive AI-development landscape, we are “supercharging the pace of innovation” through the use and development of GenAI, Wong notes.

The product, design, editorial, engineering, data science, and technology teams are working together to shorten the time between getting a customer idea to proof of concept, including the development of additional capabilities within our AI product range. These development processes will involve continuing innovation rooted in large language models (LLMs) and in what’s called agentic AI, which is technology that performs complex tasks without direct human intervention.

While it continues to build upon these evolving and innovative technology platforms, the human element remains central to our approach to product development. We are focused upon the people – our customers – who use our products. “Having a tight loop between customer feedback and customers’ emerging needs and our product and engineering teams will be critical for our future so that we can identify the right things to be innovating,” Wong says.

Get to know more about our commitment to developing and delivering innovative AI-based technology for legal, tax, risk, and other professionals.

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