Thomson Reuters has acquired Materia, a US-based agentic AI platform for tax, audit and accounting. The move comes as interest in AI agents reaches a new high in the legal sector, which TR also covers.
The company said that this transaction is complementary to its AI roadmap and accelerates Thomson Reuters’ vision for the provision of generative AI tools ‘to the professions it serves‘. It doesn’t talk directly about lawyers, but clearly the legal sector is one of TR’s key areas.
Founded in 2022, Materia has worked so far on tax, audit and accounting use cases. Its agentic AI assistant automates and augments research and workflows helping accountants to improve efficiency, effectiveness and the value they add to their clients, they said. So, no legal aspect mentioned, but is it a stretch to take learnings from Materia and apply them to legal also in the months ahead…?
David Wong, Chief Product Officer, Thomson Reuters, said: ‘Once fully integrated, Materia will transform work and unify the entire customer experience with applications across our tax, audit, and accounting portfolio. We are excited by the potential of combining Materia with Thomson Reuters content, know-how, and solutions.’
Kevin Merlini, CEO of Materia, added: ‘Materia is defining the future for how agentic AI can enhance the accounting profession. Our vision is to eliminate low-value, tedious tasks, and in doing so, both increase quality, and free up accounting teams to focus on higher value advisory work for their clients.’
Thomson Reuters Ventures was an early investor in Materia, which ‘is the first comprehensive generative AI platform built specifically for public accounting firms’.
Materia is built on a proprietary library of authoritative accounting content, integrated with firm knowledge, and key industry software. The platform offers a suite of pre-built capabilities to improve efficiency and quality for all levels of accounting staff across a variety of workflows while keeping security and accuracy central to its platform, they explained.
So, there you go. Kind of tantalising. If they aim to do the same for legal it would be a big step, but as noted, this is centred – for now – around audit and tax. But, it’s a start and let’s not be surprised when TR announces a big step toward legal AI agents in the near future.