Thomson Reuters brings the human touch to artificial intelligence

AI brings a huge benefit to our working and everyday life, making routine processes much more efficient. For many use cases, AI technology has proven to be more accurate and streamlined in its information delivery than traditional methods. AI algorithms can learn your needs, recognising behaviour patterns and returning customised solutions specific to you.

While AI technology is remarkable, the results produced by AI are best when paired with human experience and critical thinking. At Thomson Reuters, we understand this is based on three decades of applying artificial intelligence to aid human action. We rely on both domain experts and technical experts to enhance AI capabilities in our products. Our domain experts – attorneys, tax, and other industry professionals – bring their subject matter expertise, enhancing our products with their wealth of knowledge and experience. Our technical experts – research scientists, research engineers, and data scientists – provide the AI and machine learning know-how to design and power the technology behind our products. Both technical and domain experts are critical to delivering cutting-edge algorithms that are central to Thomson Reuters products and services.

The Thomson Reuters AI legacy 

Fuelled by our long history of innovation, combined with present-day expertise and invention, Thomson Reuters is uniquely positioned to bring together effective AI solutions. Over time we have identified three key ingredients that distinguish the strength of our AI:

Content

With over a century of curating and classifying data, we have some of the most comprehensive and richly enhanced legal, tax and other professional datasets in the world. Massive datasets require unique capabilities to provide quick and reliable guidance. We long ago recognised that AI was particularly well suited to meet this need, so in the early 1990s, Thomson Reuters began incorporating AI and machine learning into our solutions for the legal, tax, news, and corporate worlds.

Expertise

Our specialists, both technical and domain experts, are the critical underpinning to our best-in-class solutions. Our technical experts do the heavy lifting of developing our AI technology, training our data for machine learning systems, developing search and question-and-answer systems, and creating deep learning modules to solve complex problems. In tandem, our domain experts supply the industry background – bringing their domain knowledge, as well as their understanding of our customers’ workflow, nuances, and daily challenges into the core of our solutions. Because Thomson Reuters invests in this combined expertise, we can ensure that our solutions deliver accurate and thoughtful knowledge to our customers.

Technology

From the very beginning, we’ve been utilising technology for the purpose of providing easier access to comprehensive content to our customers through our software solutions and services. It started with introducing a nomenclature system to classify legal data and has now grown to our application of artificial intelligence within our solutions across multiple domains. We will continually leverage the advances in technology to ensure professionals have the greatest access to the information they seek.

Better AI makes for better solutions

We’ve developed AI technologies that streamline searches, make them more valuable and intuitive, automate processes, find information that traditional research may have missed, and gain data-driven insights. Our application of AI is woven through many of our processes and solutions. Some great examples include:

Westlaw Edge. Using Westlaw is the fastest way to find, understand, and validate the law reliably and thoroughly, especially for complex issues. This is enabled through a combination of editorial annotation, classification, and correction by attorneys, editorial processes to ensure rapidly changing law is kept up-to-date, and employing cutting edge AI and machine learning to enhance search and text-similarity opportunities.

ONESOURCE. Our corporate tax and trade solution simplifies business and compliance for Thomson Reuters clients. It streamlines data and automates processes, allowing for more collaboration with departments and partners and for seamless tax compliance.

Included across our ONESOURCE solutions is AI capability that aims to enhance the ways in which tax professionals complete their complex tax and trade compliance and reporting obligations. For instance, our Global Trade Management solutions provide predictive mapping capability that delivers suggestions to users on how new accounts should be mapped to a chart of accounts, and we are delivering AI driven capability in our Indirect Tax solutions for the complex and important task of product classification.

Reuters Lynx Insight. Reuters developed Lynx Insight in 2018 as part of its “cybernetic newsroom” initiative to marry the best of machine capability and human judgement to drive better journalism. Lynx Insight augments human journalism by identifying trends, anomalies, key facts and suggesting new stories reporters should write. The platform uses automated data-sifting on a vast scale, alongside algorithms programmed by Reuters journalists, to go beyond simple rote reporting into proactively offering fresh, data-driven angles that its staff can pursue.

One way the tool has helped Reuters journalists is with markets coverage: Lynx Insight scours the vast wealth of Thomson Reuters structured financial data for newsworthy items. It analyses patterns in market data, such as share prices, earnings and revenue estimates and more to surface worthwhile information to Reuters journalists, who in turn then create original news and insights and provide greater meaning from a torrent of facts. It’s a perfect example of how AI augments human intelligence.

AI augments human success

AI-powered solutions prevent that overwhelmed feeling you may get when faced with a huge amount of information, cutting through the chaff to provide faster answers and find behaviours and connections that wouldn’t have been obvious before, all in the blink of an eye.

You may not have realised how prevalent AI already is – and has been – in the Thomson Reuters solutions you rely on every day. Our solutions coupled with your expertise and knowledge, help you take the accuracy, efficiency, and impact of your work to the next level.