Generative AI will be 'transformative': Thomson Reuters CEO

Thomson Reuters (TRI) is spending big bucks to invest in generative AI. The company has committed to investing $100 million a year in the new technology, including training employees and integrating AI into its products.Thomson Reuters CEO Steve Hasker says that, for professionals, generative AI will be "as big or bigger in terms of its transformative impacts" than things like the cloud or the internet. Hasker believes professionals will be able to provide more value-added advice because AI will be handling more of the mundane tasks. But should workers be afraid that AI will cost them their jobs? Watch the video above to find out what Hasker has to say.

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Video Transcript

STEVE HASKER: Thomson Reuters has secured itself as a trusted source for data and information across the legal accounting and news media industries. Now the company is unveiling a generative AI strategy with plans to invest more than $100 million in the technology each year. Thomson Reuters will use the funding to integrate AI into its products also leverage existing partnerships and train and educate its 26,000 person workforce in AI.

For more on this, I want to bring in Steve Hasker he's the CEO of Thomson Reuters. Steve, it's good to see you here. So certainly, you're placing a priority, putting more emphasis on AI and exactly what that means for your business, but I'm curious how you see AI revolutionizing or how you see it changing your industry here going forward.

STEVE HASKER: Yeah, thanks, Seana. Thanks for the opportunity. So if I think back over the course of my career, we've had a number of seismic tech disruptions, so we had the advent of the internet, of mobile, social cloud, and we think that for professionals-- so the professionals we serve are lawyers, tax accounting risk professionals, news professionals, we think generative AI particularly is going to be as big or bigger in terms of its transformative impacts on those professions.

So specifically, there will be tasks that are done today by human beings that will be automated, that will be performed by machines, particularly some of the tasks that professionals don't like to do, the routine, sort of, repetitive, mundane stuff, firstly. Secondly, we think that that's going to free up professionals to provide more value added advice, and so it's going to put a premium on their network, the relationships, the ability to interact with other human beings to provide truly sort of differentiated advice and help to their customers.

So we think the next few years are going to be quite disrupted, but very, very transformative in terms of those professions.

BRAD SMITH: And Steve, in the past when we've discussed this investment with you before, you've talked about how it could be used in terms of the Microsoft copilot at that point that you were integrating with into your Thomson Reuters services in certain modules and services there, how it would help in content production, how it would help draw up contracts in some cases even.

And so how do you ensure that whenever you introduce some new type of generative AI experience or, kind of, framework or module that goes out to your customers, how that doesn't cannibalize other parts of the business that are already in existence?

STEVE HASKER: Yeah, I mean, we feel it, Brad, as addictive. We're not naive. We think that there will be places where-- where there is sort of time spent by human beings that will be replicated by or replaced by machines, but ultimately, one of the sort of-- the lines I have for our folks here is particularly those who are nervous about what might happen to their jobs as a result of AI, say, look, you're not going to be replaced by AI, but you might be replaced by another professional who's using AI so in other words, we all need to become-- we all need to become comfortable.

We think, as a business at Thomson Reuters, this will accelerate our growth because it's going to enable us to play a bigger broader deeper role in helping our customers navigate increasing complexity around compliance, whether that's legal compliance with all the rules and regulations, whether it's tax and accounting compliance, whether it's risk or ESG related compliance, all of those-- all of those sort of rules, regulations and the complexity associated with meeting the various laws and regulations, that's all going up and what companies and their advisors can't do is just add more and more people and more and more cost-- people related cost to handle that complexity.

So in a sense, our content driven software needs to help them navigate that in a way that's efficient and effective and fast.