Thomson Reuters debuted two agentic AI offerings that are aimed at improving tax and advisory workflows: Ready to Advise and Ready to Review.
Both are based on the company’s CoCounsel AI system (rebranded after acquiring agentic AI company Materia last year), which Nancy Hawkins, vice president product management, said in a briefing “can plan, reason, act and react,” allowing it to execute complex, multistep workflows using Thomson Reuters’ large store of content with primary resources like the IRS code along with a firm’s own documents and knowledge.
Ready to Advise is the company’s AI-powered tax planning advisory solution meant to help firms grow their strategic advisory services. The solution, said Hawkins, takes the client’s tax data from their returns and uses that to surface strategies for their specific context and provide step-by-step guidance on how to execute them. Past this, it also helps the user build the proposal for the strategy, as well as track performance on the necessary tasks to complete it. This is done in a chat interface so the advisor can ask follow-up questions throughout the process. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the bot is completing complex workflows to formulate its recommendations — it is not just producing pre-made strategies but extracting tax data, analyzing the context of that particular client, and serving up the relevant calculations on potential savings.
Hawkins said Thomson Reuters developed the tool to help firms scale their advisory services by spreading expertise throughout the entire firm.
“[Ready to Advise] provides all levels of staff with confidence, expertise and key artifacts needed to execute on these tax planning strategies. I want to be clear, this does not take the place of mentoring or coaching. Rather it enhances that behavior. It upskills junior staff to have more robust mentoring and coaching conversations with those more senior in the firm. Once complete, the advisor can show the value of the engagement to the client, and this will open the door to future advisory opportunities,” she said during the briefing.
She added later that Ready to Advise is vendor agnostic, as “our initial launch will have the user uploading the tax return, so it doesn’t matter what your tax compliance solution is, you can use Ready to Advise.”
However, she said that over the long term they do want to integrate the solution with users of other tax compliance solutions, and so while they are starting with their own, they don’t want to keep it that way.
Meanwhile, Ready to Review is the company’s agentic AI-based tax workflow solution, meant to eliminate manual work, increase efficiency and improve accuracy. The solution automatically gathers and prepares steps for simple 1040s, creating a fully automated end-to-end tax workflow solution for 1040s and business returns. Users can use it to transmit and e-file returns to authorities as well as track its status via a dashboard. It aims to save professionals time, which they can then devote to the kind of higher value activities for which one might use Ready to Advise. Hawkins said the two were made to work in tandem.
“Ready to Advise and Ready to Review are complementary and work together seamlessly. Time saved can be used to enable more advisory services. Our intention is to truly transform how tax and accounting professionals bring value to their clients,” she said.
Hawkins predicted that as AI makes firms more efficient, there will be an increase in value-based pricing, one that she is already witnessing at firms. She noted that 54% of firms use value-based pricing already, and this number is expected to grow by 15 percentage points this year.
“So advisory services can help firms increase revenue while still focusing on professional expertise and human judgment,” she said.
Ready to Advise will launch for general availability later this month. Ready to Review currently has a live early adopter program, and general availability is expected sometime in Q4.
