AI has 'real role to play' for workers: Thomson Reuters CEO

Thomson Reuters (TRI) CEO Steve Hasker joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss ongoing AI integration strategies after a strong fourth-quarter earnings report. The company announced the licensing of Reuters' news archive to large language model developers. Hasker says Reuters' "greater source of pride" is its speed in leveraging generative AI across segments like legal and tax services.

Hasker expects "profitable growth" through 2025 and 2026 from AI adoption. On job displacement fears, he notes it "depends on the profession" while acknowledging "acute talent shortages" in areas like accounting. Hasker believes AI has "a real role to play" in doing complex work to ease strained demand rather than replace professionals.

Overall, Hasker believes AI should be viewed as an asset for closing talent gaps and enhancing human productivity, not as a threat.

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Editor's note: This article was written by Angel Smith

Video Transcript

- Thomson Reuters doubling down on AI. The company announcing today it will license the Reuters news archive to large language model companies. News coming after Thomson Reuters reported a beat on the bottom line during the fourth quarter forecast, a larger-than-expected revenue rise in the year ahead thanks in part to its ongoing AI investments.

We are joined now by Steve Hasker, Thomson Reuters CEO. Steve, it is great to see you. I thought we could start, Steve, just help us think through the quarter, what drove the quarter, Steve, and what is going to kind of drive this acceleration in organic growth that you all see ahead.

STEVE HASKER: Yeah, thanks, Josh. Good to be here. So we met or exceeded all of our targets and guidance for both the fourth quarter and also the full year 2023.

So we're happy with that. I think-- but more important or a greater source of pride is the speed with which we've been able to integrate generative AI in our core flagship products starting in legal in the content-driven technology that serves lawyers across the world and soon to roll out into the products and services that we use to serve tax and accounting professionals and, ultimately, news professionals through the Reuters news agency.

So that's really been the basis of the conversation that we've had with investors today since we announced our earnings. We're going to increase our investment intensity through this year. And we've talked about that with the implied return of higher and more profitable growth through '25 and '26.

- Hey, Steve. It's Julie here. Of course, one of the questions that, you know, investors asking that one question, I think-- many of your clients probably are asking a question as well-- is it going to serve those various professionals or replace those various professionals, right? That's been a source of anxiety. And, Steve, let's be transparent. I'm asking partially for myself as a news professional, right, who consumes Reuters' content.

You know, how is AI sort of being used in that arena? And you all also are working with to train some of these large language models using Reuters' content. So I'm just curious sentiment wise inside the organization how that is being received.

STEVE HASKER: Yeah, Julie, it's a great question. And it's one we get quite often. I think it depends on the profession. Firstly and secondly, it's early days. But a couple of observations.

The first is in the tax and accounting and audit professions that we serve with one of the largest providers of content and content-driven technology, AI-driven solutions to that profession, there is an acute shortage in talent. So the number of people sort of coming through graduate schools, coming out of undergraduate going into tax and accounting and audit has dwindled over time.

And so therefore, the technology has a real role to play. The number of tax returns is going up. The complexity of tax returns are going up. The complexity of audits is going up. So the demand for the work continues to grow. And the complexity of the work continues to grow.

But there just aren't the qualified professionals to get through that work. So the technology has a real role to play. And this will not be one of those cases where, you know, there are sort of layoffs and retrenchments in my view because of that talent shortage.

And then similarly, if you go across to the Reuters' news bureaus, which operate in over 100 countries, you know, we are covering two wars. We are covering seismic changes in demographics, in financial markets in China, different parts of the world. The amount of news stories, whether it be breaking news or investigative work, market-moving news that we are across just continues to grow and grow and grow.

And so similarly, that-- whether it's generative AI or broader machine learning techniques, there's an acute need to integrate them into the news gathering and the curation and distribution process in ways that we haven't seen before just to cover the breadth of what's going on in the world. So we don't foresee layoffs or replacement of journalists and editors, photographers, videographers in any way, shape, or form because of that sort of supply-demand dynamic.