The organisation
Thomson Reuters is a content-driven technology conglomerate. Founded in 1851 as the Reuters news agency in London, it became one of the world’s foremost newswire services.
After a merger in 2008 with Canadian electronic publisher Thomson Corporation, Reuters maintained its traditional news agency business and added the provision of information on professional services to businesses, governments and individuals worldwide.
The problem
The release of publicly available generative AI model ChatGPT in 2022 put the creative capabilities of AI at the fingertips of every internet user, something that Thomson Reuters’ chief people officer Mary Alice Vuicic describes as “such an important moment”. She says: “Of everything, AI will have the single biggest impact on modern work in our lifetimes and HR has a unique role to play.”
Reuters had an existing, long-running AI product strategy, Vuicic explained, but she felt there was a lack of focus on an internal AI workforce strategy. AI has been a great source of anxiety in the world of journalism. In January 2025, the National Union of Journalists stated that the use of AI could “directly threaten journalism and risks the reputation of every journalist abiding by ethical standards to ensure accuracy and honesty through their work".
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Journalists’ work already informs generative AI searches, creating intellectual property issues. Other problems arise from journalists being unable to differentiate AI-generated information from real-life events, potentially driving the creation of false reports.
Further, policies on AI use in newsrooms remain inconsistent or vague, and journalists’ AI training varies, according to EU-funded research from Euractiv in February 2025.
However, as in many professions, AI use has the potential to create widescale efficiency and lighten the burden of administrative tasks. Recognising the importance of mastering this technology, Vuicic pushed for an internal AI strategy.
“In June 2023, I sat down with the head of technology and the executive team and I said: ‘We need to jointly lead an internal strategy here. We have to evolve and upskill at a rate faster than our external environment.’”
The proposal got immediate support from other leaders. “We were so focused on customer and product roadmap, that when I brought it forward, it was like: why haven’t we thought of that yet? Everyone is engaged in it,” she says.
The method
After creating the strategy, Vuicic has embedded the drive for employee AI adoption into employees’ performance objectives and broader company objectives and key results (OKRs). Reuters also implemented a new set of values in 2025, including ‘Act fast, learn fast’. The company explains this value as: “We iterate in days – not weeks or months. We are willing to risk fast failure, and we quickly learn from our mistakes. We are decisive and commit to decisions, turning them into action.”
Vuicic says: “We were very clear from the beginning about our tone and communication from the top. We had open candid conversations.
“From 2022, AI replaced remote and hybrid work as the main question in our town halls and meetings. But we encouraged people to ask questions and raise their concerns.
“Once people get past the fear and anxiety, they move to curiosity. That willingness to then try, and experiment, and adapt, is a key piece of our change management.”
Vuicic created a ‘top-down and bottom-up’ strategy based on the ‘four Ts’: tone, training, tools and time to experiment. “We implemented a global learning day for training on AI, creating a clear expectation that the game has changed and people must upskill. It’s a personal responsibility.
“We also made sure to provide access to AI tools in a secure environment. Employees will access them insecurely if we didn’t.”
Thomson Reuters created a suite of AI tools called Open Arena, giving employees the space to experiment without fear of sharing sensitive company information and risking data security. Tools include Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Llama.
Vuicic adds: “Beyond that, we’re adopting job-specific tools and giving our employees quarterly dedicated learning time to upskill.”
She emphasises that training gives employees a bridge to work in a different way, getting past the hesitation of doing things the way they’ve always been done.
“This is a continued need for humans, who need to continually upskill to do higher value work” Vuicic says. “Once they’re hands on, they’re often delighted by how simple and approachable the technology is.”
The result
More than 20 AI use cases have been deployed so far, Vuicic explains. For journalists, these include a tool called Fact Genie to help extract key information out of press releases, and an AI assistant in the company’s content management system which allows editors to get headline suggestions and bullet point summaries of longer stories with the click of a button. Journalists also use AI to help translate content into different languages, and to transcribe interviews and speeches.
Currently, 60% of the workforce are using the Open Arena. Vuicic’s team has even been able to track super users of the tools, to learn from how they are deploying AI and suggest tips to their teammates.
This widespread adoption has had a hugely positive effect on morale, according to Vuicic. “It’s remarkable. We’ve been tracking the perception of our upskilling of people for the future, and it has been very positive. We have also seen increases in employee engagement. We’re seeing unprecedented levels of retention – although some of this is to do with the macro environment – and we’re also seeing the highest levels of organisational health in annual surveys since they began. Some of the biggest gains have been in learning and community.”
The company’s Organisational Health Index Survey showed that learning and innovation scores had improved by seven points year-on-year, from 2023 to 2024. This has been attributed to the firm’s greater emphasis on innovation and AI investment, as well as its positive investment in learning and growth.
What Vuicic is hearing directly from employees is equally positive: “I travel around the world to meet with employees and the consistent thing I have heard is that they appreciate being encouraged to adapt to AI, rather than discouraged.”
Moving forward, the company will continue to ‘act fast, learn fast’, she says, adding: “We have plans for more use cases, and we want to continue adapting and learning and working in different ways. We have an obligation to accelerate.”
This article was published in the March/April 2025 edition of HR magazine.
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