Like a breakout artist on a press tour, Thomson Reuters’ Kevin Merlini says the debut of its GenAI assistant for tax, accounting, audit, and legal professionals is good, but what’s to come will be even better.

During a May 29 media presentation and demo in New York, Merlini told attendees that the launch of AI copilot startup Materia AI, acquired by Thomson Reuters in October 2024 and rebranded as CoCounsel, was a “breakthrough” for professionals. According to US usage data, CoCounsel can reduce the time it takes to draft and review contracts by as much as 63%.

However, Merlini, CoCounsel’s VP of product management, and his team knew CoCounsel’s ability to answer questions and assist with research was not the be-all, end-all for the GenAI tool, which the company claims could help professionals with time-consuming day-to-day tasks.

“For us, that was never really the finish line. That was never the vision,” Merlini said. “That was just a starting point.”

Let’s talk about taxes.—BM

Home Depot hires internally, the state of Maryland gets a new CISO, Cisco poaches a Google Cloud exec, and a CTO resigns in explosive fashion in this month’s overview of tech C-suite changes.

Home Depot’s new CIO has decades of in-house experience

On May 29, the Home Depot announced it was hiring an internal candidate to lead the company’s IT strategy. Angie Brown, who has been with the company for 27 years, joins its executive team after decades as an IT staffer, most recently as SVP of technology.

Brown joined Home Depot out of college in 1998 as an associate systems engineer; her work has seen her climb the corporate IT ladder in the company. She replaces outgoing CIO Fahim Siddiqui, who worked for Home Depot for six and a half years.

See who else shook up the C-suite.—EH

It’s always good to have early detection—and cloud security firm Zscaler has a new canary in the proverbial coal mine.

Zscaler’s acquisition of Red Canary, a managed detection and response leader, will combine data and SecOps to give the parent company a more aggressive and integrated approach to cybersecurity. The deal is for $675 million in cash and is expected to close this August.

On a Q3 earnings call just two days after the announcement, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry told investors that the acquisition builds on the company’s buying out of data fabric company Avalor. Red Canary got on their radar for its ability to interact and synthesize with the Zscaler data fabric the company built from its Avalor acquisition.

How Red Canary is scaling up.—EH

A purple talking gorilla once marketed as kid-friendly fun helped usher spyware into millions of homes—seriously. This wild true story unpacks the strange intersection of tech, marketing, and malware. Read now to uncover how curiosity and nostalgia masked a major privacy invasion.