Thomson Reuters announced its entry into the agentic AI arena with CoCounsel for tax, audit, and accounting professionals, touted as but the first step in a wider rework of its product line centered around the integrating of semi-autonomous agents.
CoCounsel for tax, audit and accounting professionals is described as a vertical-specific AI agent designed for modern tax and accounting professionals. It automates work such as client review, memo drafting and compliance checks, and provides explainable outputs if people wonder how the bot came to the conclusions it did. By drawing on multiple sources of information it can also connect firm knowledge, Checkpoint, IRS code, and internal documents into a single AI-guided workspace.
“This isn’t GenAI in a prettier wrapper — it’s a fully integrated, intelligent system built to do the work,” said Kevin Merlini, vice president of product at Thomson Reuters, and the former CEO of Materia. “Now CoCounsel doesn’t just assist — it acts with context, navigates complexity, and integrates directly into how professionals already operate. It’s purpose-built for high-stakes work — and it’s only the beginning.”
The release has been in development for over a year, with the process being materially helped along through the company’s acquisition of tax and accounting-specialized AI-development firm Materia late last year. This acquisition has enabled Thomson Reuters to take a broader approach to agentic AI, concentrating not so much on standalone agentic tools but, rather, integrating agents throughout the product line. This approach involves agents that draw from features and content across platforms such as Checkpoint, Westlaw, and Practical Law to act and reason within already accepted industry best practices.
“We’re not just rebranding AI assistants. We’re engineering full agentic systems — backed by trusted content, custom-trained models, and real domain expertise,” David Wong, chief product officer at Thomson Reuters, said. “What others are calling agentic, we’ve already had in the market. What we’re launching now sets a new bar: this is what AI looks like when it’s built with real content, trained with real experts, and trusted by the professionals who do real work.”
For example, Thomson Reuters intends to next build on its GoSystem Tax Engine to have it not just assist with returns but actually draft them itself, as well as adapt to system feedback and resolve diagnostics on its own. The rollout of agentic systems will continue with expanded capabilities across legal, risk and trade, and compliance domains — including intelligent workflows for intelligent drafting, employment policy generation, deposition analysis, and compliance risk assessments.
