Despite being among the earliest adopters of AI, Thomson Reuters will never replace professionals, CEO says
In Paul Julius Reuter’s day, it was carrier pigeons and telegraph cables. In Roy Thomson’s age, it was radio stations and newspapers. In Steve Hasker’s era, the CEO of Thomson Reuters is using artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver news and information.
The Australian native never intended to work in digital media but says he fell into the field by following the colleagues he most enjoyed working with.
“It was in some ways accidental,” he says. “I liked the people I was working with, and they seemed to be able to tolerate me, so I ended up doing project after project in that space and developed some expertise.”
After serving as global president for audience intelligence provider Nielsen and following brief stints as CEO of the Creative Artists Agency and a senior adviser at American private equity firm TPG, Hasker took over as president and CEO of Thomson Reuters in 2020.
The company — which was created through the acquisition of 175-year-old U.K.-based Reuters by 90-year-old Toronto-based Thomson Corporation in 2008 — is now an $8-billion business, with 27,000 employees in 70 countries, including 1,200 in Canada.
The corner of the brand most are familiar with, its news division, is in fact one of its smaller entities, according to Hasker. Thomson Reuters also provides content for 600,000 customers in the legal, tax, accounting, audit, risk and compliance fields, and was among the earliest adopters of AI.
“In the early 1990s we put a functioning search algorithm on the front of (legal research platform) Westlaw,” he says. “In other words, we were in the AI business before Google was commercialized.”
Now the company is writing its next chapter from the Thomson Reuters technology centre in downtown Toronto, where a team of data scientists, software engineers and developers are collaborating on its latest AI-driven products and solutions.
The Star spoke with Hasker from the new innovation hub about Canada’s role in the development of AI, how the technology will impact professionals in the near future, and how Thomson Reuters has stayed true to its founding mission.
What was your first experience working on this side of the world?
After I graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1990, I went to work at PwC for four and a half years, and then I ended up getting into Columbia in 1995, but I will confess I only ended up there because I got accepted, and because I got some financial support from the university.
I did a combined international affairs and MBA degree; I had two Nobel Prize-winning professors, I did internships in St. Petersburg and what was then the world’s largest copper mine in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I loved every minute of it.
When did you pivot into digital media?
I started working at McKinsey in 1998 doing work in basic materials, metals and mining, some work in New Zealand in the dairy industry and in financial services in the U.K. Then I found my way back to New York where I was thrown into the telecom, high-tech, and media practices, and ended up sticking there.
Why did you stay?
I liked the people I was working with, and they seemed to be able to tolerate me, so I ended up doing project after project in that space and developed some expertise.
I give young people trying to navigate their careers one piece of advice, which is “just follow great people.” Instead of trying to pick an industry, company, role, title, or even the pay packet, if you find yourself working with people who care about you — and not just based on what you can do for them — stick with them, because they’ll help you grow and learn when you inevitably make mistakes.
Why did you leave McKinsey in 2009?
There was an assumption that I would stay forever, but I was approached by a guy named Dave Calhoun — who recently stepped down as the CEO of Boeing — to join him at Nielsen. He said, “you’ve been in consulting a long time, you probably think you know how to run a business. Trust me, few consultants do, but I’ll teach you.”
Dave worked at General Electric under Jack Welch for 27 years, and I figured if I’m going to learn how to do this, who better to learn it from? So I went to Nielsen and ended up staying there for eight years.
Why do you believe you were picked as CEO of Thomson Reuters?
I talked to my predecessor about this. He started his career as a journalist, and I think the board wanted more of a technology focus going forward to move from being a content company to a content-driven technology company.
What was it like joining in March of 2020?
My first day was March 15, and my first conversation with the senior team was at 9 a.m. on a Sunday about whether we should ask our 26,000 employees to work from home. I didn’t have the information necessary to make that decision, but even if I did, none of us had faced a pandemic before, so nobody knew how to navigate it.
Then I remembered a quote from a famous professional sporting coach in Australia, Craig Bellamy, who said, “the bigger the game, the simpler the game plan.” I remember thinking we’re an IP-driven company, the IP exists in the minds of our people, and the only thing that matters is the health and safety of our people.
So, we decided to ask everyone to work from home, and the business thrived. We were able to find new ways to do things, to innovate, to support people, and I think we came out of the pandemic a lot stronger.
What ties the many pieces of Thomson Reuters together?
We obviously have Reuters, which is a news business, but it’s a relatively small part of Thomson Reuters. We are the leading provider of content-driven technology to lawyers, tax, accounting and audit professionals, and risk and compliance professionals.
There are two things that bind those three areas together and extends into the news side. First, professionals face very significant and never-ending increases in the complexity associated with compliance — complying with laws, tax codes, audit regulations, ESG regulations. We clarify the complexity by providing content, through scalable technology.
The second is AI. We’ve been in the AI business for 30 years, and we think those professions will be transformed in interesting ways by generative AI. Combining our content with our expertise around AI, we think we can be very valuable to our customers.
Does that mean their jobs may be at risk?
We believe professionals will not be replaced by AI but might be by people using AI. We see it as a supplement and accelerant to the work they do, rather than a substitute. One of our core principles is that a human being must take accountability for each piece of news, so we ensure that we’ve got a human in the loop in any of our news stories, and that has been our experience in each of those professions.
How will their work change in the coming years?
We think within three to five years every journalist will be using an AI assistant to help them do research, verify facts, generate story ideas, and create first drafts. The same goes for lawyers, tax, audit and accounting professionals, maybe even people like me.
Why did the company choose to bring its AI development to Toronto?
Canada is doing a great job developing AI talent and moving the AI-industry forward in terms of research and development. I’d point to the Vector Institute that (AI godfather) Geoffrey Hinton is affiliated with. The work that Vector has done and the research it’s both undertaking and sponsoring is world-leading, and positions Canada — and specifically Toronto — at the forefront.
I also think Canada’s protection of IP and copyright have been underpinnings of the content industries, so there’s an opportunity to build upon those efforts and accelerate into a global leadership position in this space.
How is Thomson Reuters staying true to the mission of its founders?
Roy Thomson founded the Thomson Corporation in the 1960s selling transistor radios in rural Canada, and ended up buying radio stations, newspapers and TV stations, in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., eventually including Reuters, the largest wholesaler of news at that time. Paul Julius Reuter founded Reuters in London 175 years ago using carrier pigeons and telegraphs, and two things were foundational and part of their business ethos.
The first was innovation. Julius Reuter was the first to put a cable under the Atlantic, becoming the first to report the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Europe. The same is true of Roy Thomson, who drove innovation in his newspaper, radio and TV businesses.
The second is our Trust Principals, which were created in 1941 but had been part of Reuters since the beginning. They dictate that all the information we publish and all the solutions we provide are independent, unbiased and fact-based. You won’t see opinion or narrative, a lean to the left or right — you’ll just see the facts.
Today we’re embracing technology, and we continue to apply our Trust Principals. Our AI tools don’t use customer inputs to determine output, all the information we publish has a human that’s accountable for it, and we provide transparency regarding the inputs of any AI product.
Innovation and trust have been embedded in the company for 175 years, and we think we’re applying those quite forcefully and consistently in this new generative-AI era.
This articles was first reported by The Star
