Welcome to a very special episode of the Cube and NYC Wired. Coming to you from the Agentic Studio here at the AI Agent Conference in New York and we are talking all things builders, breakers, and bots rewiring the world of tech and the world as we know it. Joining me now is Steve Hasker, CEO of Thomson Reuters, and Vanessa Lau, non-executive chair at Appen. Welcome folks.
Yeah, thanks Gemma. So, we at Thomson Reuters, we serve fiduciary grade AI. So we're serving AI and agents, platforms and agents to professions like lawyers, tax preparers, auditors who have to be right. And so we combine content, expertise, data privacy and protection and a whole series of customer service and support to ensure that our products don't hallucinate and are more accurate than perhaps a general purpose. And that gives a qualified attorney or a practicing accountant the confidence that they can sit in front of their client or in front of a judge or the SEC or the IRS and present those results and know that they're accurate. And we think to your question that a machine cannot and should not assume that for example the rights of a practicing attorney or a practicing CPA. So there always needs to be someone to take accountability and essentially to take the liabilities associated with that professional advice and that work product.
It's actually so critical for Frontier Models. If you just take a look at what they have had to do over the last years, it has been being able to get as much human data out there as possible to make themselves as like expert grade, making them just basically reflect nuances in the world. But we all know that a lot of that data is in our heads and so there is still so much data to be gathered out there. So we at Appen, which we're both on the board, we're very very bullish about the fact that there's so much data to be captured in order to make AI really usable for all companies out there.
So Thomson Reuters is a company that's over 175 years old, right? At the moment it's somewhat of a market darling. I mean I looked at the stock earlier when I was prepping for this and I was thinking, 'Wow, I wish I'd bought.' Right? Like you guys are doing well and you Steve have really been quite public in saying that you are all in on AI. You said you've got 10 billion in dry powder you're going to deploy between now and 2027. I mean cheeky question but let's start with what are you going to spend it on like you know let's start there.
Yeah. So Gemma, we've had a what I think is a balanced and sort of disciplined, rigorous capital allocation approach, but we enter this sort of new era of Agentic AI with some confidence in that we have the dry powder to be able to react as the market shifts and change. We've deployed already about $2.5 billion dollars in acquisitions, very much focused on our what we call our big three, which is serving law firms, tax accounting firms, corporations. And we'll continue on that path. But it's you know I think to have a fortress balance sheet in this environment while things are changing so quickly is a tremendous asset and one I'm very thankful for.
Vanessa, you've just sold your company Sugarwork. So you've already seen I guess the buy and exit side of this era. Talk to me a little about the lessons. I mean, you know, what has that whole process been like and what do you think companies are in the acquisition side of this house are really due diligencing for in a world that feels very ambiguous?
Well, I think just to give everybody a background on what Sugarwork does, we capture tacit institutional undocumented knowledge for companies. And so, think about what is in people's heads walking around in a company. You have your systems data, you have your documents, but what is in most employees heads is not typically and regularly extracted. That's what we do at Sugarwork. And I think this is about being in the right place at the right time. When we first started the business four years ago, this was pre-ChatGPT coming out. But what we thought and saw from a demographic trends perspective is that there are so many baby boomers and Gen Xers now retiring, leaving basically companies in droves. And if you look at the demographic shifts, it's not like there are more workers coming into the workforce that they're actually fewer. So that was actually what we bet on. We exited because we saw that this data is actually incredibly important for companies to be able to take advantage of AI. So just like you need to train an employee when they come into an organization so you are even if they're rock stars you need to make sure you onboard them well same thing when it comes to AI agents you have to give them the business context so that they are going to be able to run well so we happen to be in the right place at the right time and I think that right now things are moving so quickly data is really the proprietary moat I think like Steve is seeing that in Thomson Reuters we are seeing that at Appen and certainly seeing that at Sugarwork as well.
Because you mentioned market entrance, people exiting the workforce. I mean, we're at a very interesting time from the perspective of the labor force, right? And there are some, I would say, competing narratives around us. Some, you know, AI is going to replace humans, others AI is going to make humans more productive. We heard Jensen Huang this year say smart companies aren't going to do more with less, they're going to do more with more. Right? Like so talk to me a little bit about how you guys as two seasoned leaders in very successful career part at a very successful interpoint of your career think about that maybe I'll start with you with either of you.
Yeah, I mean I you know I could talk about the professions that we serve so you know as I said lawyers tax and accounting professionals auditors if I start with the tax accounting and audit there is an acute talent shortage in that profession so over the last 10 to 15 years the number of returns has gone up. The complexity of those returns has gone up and the same for audits. And yet the number of college graduates who want to come in and become CPAs has declined markedly. So there's a huge gap in terms of performing that work and candidly creating a functioning economy because they're essential to that. And so we think the technology has an enormous role to play. Now, if you then go across the legal profession, I challenge you to find a lawyer that doesn't feel overworked or at least hasn't felt overworked during and after the pandemic. And so, I think the first thing that the technology needs to do is to restore some work life balance to that profession. I think though beyond that, we'll see. The tools I think are ahead of the change management within firms and within a general counsel's office. So, it's really too early to answer your question from a legal profession. But it may well be that law firms can handle a lot more matters with fewer people. But the flip side of that is that AI itself will bring I think a tremendous surge of demand for legal counsel and a surge in litigations and in transactions. And so, you know, it's not, I think, a clear narrative to say there will be a dislocation in the labor market for those professions. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that.
And Vanessa, when we talk about, you know, maybe the opportunity that AI might give us a bit of a breather, right? It might help make our lives easier. One thing I heard last week when talking about the release of Codex, he said, you know, this technology does more in an hour than I did in weeks, but I've never been busier, right? And some folks, especially in the dev community, really, I think, are living that. They're saying, you know, I'm up all night because I'm doing so much. It's almost like a form of sorcery. What are your thoughts? Like, how do you think about it? Do you think it's going to make people even more crazed?
I think that there is so much excitement right now around AI and because it's unleashing creativity for people who might not have had the tools to be able to build in the past and now they can. And so, I think that that is what we're seeing quite a lot of. I don't think it's very sustainable to be working all of the time. But I think about what Steve just said in if you think about when ATMs came into the foray into banks, I think there were so many people touting the demise of the bank teller position and actually in fact after ATMs came into the market there are more bank tellers being hired. Why? because they were spending more time developing customers and customer relationships and growing the businesses for banks. That is what I do see already happening in the mid-market where a lot of my work is done at least on the Sugarwork side. There was this one MedTech company we had been serving who were where the salesperson literally I remember going to his desk and I asked him what are these pile of papers that were neatly bound on the desk and he said well each one represents a seven figure opportunity but I just don't have the time to close it and I don't have the time to talk to our product development team about what they need to do so I could capture that revenue and so I think about those types of companies and what AI can do you can really help them automate those mundane, repetitive tasks which just takes up so much time so that they can unleash so much more opportunity gains. And so that's what I see a lot of now. I think like that salesperson if we were to arm them with like, oh, you know, you could do X, Y, and Z all like with a just a wave of a wand, he would probably be working all the time for the first few weeks, but we would see that taper off like realizing this is just a new tool that could really just help you do your work that much better.
