Thomson Reuters today (2 June) announced the launch of new agentic AI capability, beginning with CoCounsel for tax, audit, and accounting professionals.
While today’s most advanced AI assistants can generate results when prompted, agentic AI goes beyond responding under a pre-defined sequence of actions. It plans, reasons, acts, and reacts inside workflows to complete complex, multi-step assignments.
The Thomson Reuters agentic platform has been in development for over a year, accelerated by its acquisition of Materia, the AI copilot startup specialising in agentic systems for tax and accounting.
CoCounsel for tax, audit and accounting professionals is a vertical-specific AI agent designed for tax and accounting professionals. It automates work from client file review to memo drafting and compliance checks, while providing explainable outputs. It connects 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 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.”
Speaking at a media briefing ahead of the launch, chief product officer David Wong said: “CoCounsel with Agentic AI moves to become more an intelligent partner in a workflow. It can take a goal, break it down into component tasks, ask for feedback and guide the user through the solution and use tools to help with that. We believe that with agentic AI professionals can experience a boost in productivity and achieve more complex problem solving.”
Thomson Reuters is drawing from the features and content across platforms such as Checkpoint, Westlaw, and Practical Law.
Emily Colbert, senior vice president of product management, demonstrated the forthcoming new functionality in CoCounsel for legal. If you need to draft a demand letter, CoCounsel can summarise and analyse the documents you upload; create a chronology of things need to happen; and create a first draft. The human in the loop will be able to track and authorise the stages.
There is much debate about whether the technology being introduced to the market is truly agentic. Thomson Reuters has stressed that this new agentic technology has autonomy – although they are carefully balancing the demand for agentic AI as opposed to a guided workflow and the new release is a mix of both.
Wong said that this version will serve as a good foundation, commenting: “Once people can accomplish a relatively linear task we can show how it might change. We’re starting with something that will drive trust and adoption.”
Early tax customers are said to already to be seeing the benefits and at tax processing company BLISS 1041, chief information officer Rich Marlatt said: “Before CoCounsel, we were manually comparing residency and filing codes across 36 states. Each jurisdiction used to take us half a week to fully review—now it takes under an hour. We built our own templates in CoCounsel for 1041 returns across 50 states and now due to agentic research and reusable templates, we can feed client-specific factors and instantly understand how each state handles them.”
This story is being updated.