Apr 27, 2024 | AI assistant

Thomson Reuters (TSX/NYSE: TRI), a global content and technology company, today announced the expanded vision for CoCounsel, its professional-grade GenAI assistant.

CoCounsel will unify the entire customer experience and give customers a new way to access Thomson Reuters product capabilities through a single GenAI assistant with applications across Legal, Tax, Risk & Fraud, and Media.

CoCounsel is an AI assistant that acts like a team member – handling complex tasks with natural language understanding. Completing tasks at superhuman speeds, CoCounsel provides high-quality information at the right time, maintains multiple threads of work, as well as keeping context and memory across the different tasks and products customers use each day. By augmenting professional work with GenAI skills, CoCounsel delivers accelerated and streamlined workflows, enables professionals to produce higher-quality work more quickly, all while keeping customer data secure. Watch more here.

Over time CoCounsel will link Thomson Reuters products across its entire portfolio, meaning customers can bring together multiple skills and workflows from different products into one place to enhance user experience and value.

“Today, Thomson Reuters published a global AI study sharing that 81% of professionals believe AI could be applied to their work; responding to customers changing needs challenges us to build and apply the very best applications of GenAI to professional work,” said David Wong, Thomson Reuters Chief Product Officer. “Our unique combination of resources means we can deliver on our vision of providing professionals a new, human-centric point of access to our suite of Thomson Reuters products. As our products continue to expand and improve, the customer experience will remain centered in our GenAI assistant as CoCounsel learns new skills and capabilities – unlocking productivity and becoming the way professionals work.”

Thomson Reuters uses cutting-edge generative AI technologies. For example, CoCounsel is powered by GPT-4, thanks to an early and ongoing partnership with OpenAI.

“We are excited to continue working with Thomson Reuters. By powering solutions like CoCounsel, their new professional-grade AI Assistant, together we make knowledge workers more creative and productive,” said Brad Lightcap, COO at OpenAI. “AI automates routine tasks and makes it possible to quickly analyze huge amounts of data – but even more importantly, it helps people come up with new ways to solve complex problems.”

Delivering new CoCounsel skills for Tax and Legal professionals

CoCounsel is embedded in and delivers the power of GenAI where professionals work, whether it’s in Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel, and Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel. Today, the company is announcing new, additional skills for both Tax and Legal professionals including:

Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel – Our first generative AI product for tax professionals delivers better, faster answers to complex tax research questions, rooted in Thomson Reuters trusted proprietary content, enhancing efficiency for seasoned researchers and enabling inexperienced researchers to work with reduced supervision.

Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel – The first Thomson Reuters generative AI legal research offering in the UK streamlines the initial phase of legal research, allowing customers to ask complex questions in natural language and delivering a synthesized answer grounded in trusted Westlaw content with detailed insights from top results including a list of key cases, legislation, and related topics.

CoCounsel Integrations with Microsoft 365 – With third-party integrations, CoCounsel will connect professionals with the tools they use daily starting with Microsoft 365 – adding CoCounsel applications for Teams, Word, Outlook, and SharePoint to accelerate research, drafting and review.

“At Ford, we constantly pursue technology at the forefront of AI and machine learning innovation, to strengthen operations across the company, from design and manufacturing to legal and compliance. When I first saw CoCounsel as a beta customer, I knew it was a game-changer,” said Darth Vaughn, Managing Director, Legal Ops+ and Litigation Counsel at Ford Motor Company. “With CoCounsel, we work more efficiently and thoroughly, giving people in a wide range of roles more time for higher-level, strategic work, as well as cross-functional coordination. We eagerly anticipate skills that continue to enhance our legal professionals and our broader organization.”

Thomson Reuters will use its GenAI platform to create even more GenAI skills, and they’ll be introduced into products across every business segment it serves under the CoCounsel brand. Thomson Reuters is well-positioned to deliver an experience that will transform professional work by calling on its 30+ years of experience in this field and its proprietary content used to continue to expand its GenAI platform.

The GenAI platform – accelerating the delivery of professional-grade GenAI

Thomson Reuters has invested in infrastructure positioning them to innovate with GenAI—designing, developing, and launching new, high-quality GenAI features—quickly and securely, aligned to its Data and AI Ethics Principles.

Thomson Reuters has both trusted, proprietary, content knowledge-based models, as well as a portfolio of workflow-embedded software tools, all brought together through its one-of-a-kind GenAI engineering platform. This common development platform enables the company to design, build, and deploy reusable GenAI components that become the building blocks for future skills and products, positioning the company to deliver on a vision for enabling professionals across multiple industries to seamlessly complete complicated work involving multiple products through a single GenAI assistant.

Availability

• Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel is available to customers in the UK.
• Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel is expected initially in the United States, starting from summer 2024.
• CoCounsel Integrations with Microsoft 365 are expected to be available in BETA to customers in the USA and UK from summer 2024.
• Further roll out of CoCounsel skills are expected across 2024 and beyond

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS, MATERIAL RISKS AND MATERIAL ASSUMPTIONS. Certain statements in this news release are forward-looking, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the company’s strategic priorities, initiatives and opportunities. The words “expect”, “believe” and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. While the company believes that it has a reasonable basis for making forward-looking statements in this news release, they are not a guarantee of future performance or outcomes and there is no assurance that any of the other events described in any forward-looking statement will materialize. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations. Many of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions are beyond our company’s control and the effects of them can be difficult to predict. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements which reflect expectations only as of the date of this news release. Except as may be required by applicable law, Thomson Reuters disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.