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.”
Now, less than a year later, CoCounsel has been equipped with an upgraded set of agentic capabilities to help take an even bigger load off professionals. Agentic capabilities for CoCounsel tax, accounting, and audit, which went live on June 2, will allow users to automate tasks such as client file reviews, memo drafting, and compliance checks.
“It’s an integrated intelligence system that can take real work off your plate,” Merlini said.
Build-an-agent. To revamp CoCounsel with agentic intelligence, Thomson Reuters CPO David Wong said the company took advantage of the Rolodex of software tools to allow CoCounsel to perform tasks more easily.
“What we did is we essentially taught CoCounsel how to use a lot of the software that our customers already used today and that they have access to,” said Wong during the presentation.
“This meant that we could quickly bootstrap and create workflows that would solve more complex problems of our customers.”
Agentic AI, AI systems that can act on their own and autonomously solve multi-step problems, is the latest buzzword in the industry. Tech giants, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google, have begun to introduce agentic tools and workflows to users.
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Wong added that the company also leveraged its subject matter experts to help train its models.
“We’re training them with more than 4,500 in-house experts at Thomson Reuters, across legal, tax, [and] compliance domains that we’ve had on our staff for years and years,” Wong said.
Priorities. Ryan Walker, VP of technology for CoCounsel, laid out the principles that guided the development process behind the company’s agentic vision, which include the understanding that the future is multi-model and multi-agent.
“Our systems need to support the ability to orchestrate across different models and across different agents because no one tool is going to be the best tool for the job to be done,” Walker said during the presentation.
Walker said the company also builds its tools with the understanding that humans serve as “an integral part of the process.” This means making sure that answers provided to users meet the “high standards” of compliance needed.
He added that partnerships remain a crucial part of its strategy. Thomson Reuters partnered with OpenAI to create a custom LLM for CoCounsel.
Big dreams. Today, Thomson Reuters has more than 5,000 engineers working on AI, Merlini said. The company, which has previously disclosed a commitment to make annual investments of more than $100 million in AI, has plans to debut CoCounsel’s agentic capabilities for legal over the summer and additional agentic tools, including an “agentic tax prep application” capable of drafting tax returns, later this year.
In a sit-down chat on the sidelines of the event, Wong told IT Brew that the company is excited about the recent evolution of CoCounsel and the opportunities it will bring.
“Sam Altman sometimes talked about how he wants to create systems that can complete five-minute tasks, five-hour tasks, and five-day tasks. That’s the vision that they have for their models and with ChatGPT,” Wong said. “We’re on the same path. It’s just that we want to take on those…tasks, but in legal, tax, audit, [and] accounting.”