Thomson Reuters' Brain

Much of Thomson Reuters’ business is built on adding value to information by making it easier to find, combine, and adapt it. Increasingly, New York City–based Thomson Reuters is a technology business, run by information scientists not just experts in law or finance.

In Eagan, the company’s R&D group has its home base. Some $4 billion worth of business from Thomson Reuters’ divisions hums through three massive data centers. And Peter Warwick, CEO of Thomson Reuters Legal, says there are space and plans to build more.

Artificial Intelligence

The Eagan campus employs 7,000—far more than at any other Thomson Reuters location. The company (NYSE: TRI) has offices in 100 countries and more than 50,000 employees.

Legal has a total of 15,000 people in 27 countries. It’s just one of seven primary business units in the company (see sidebar), but it’s a big contributor to the bottom line. In 2008, it accounted for 27 percent of Thomson Reuters’ $13.4 billion in revenue and 39 percent of its operating income. In the first quarter of 2009, the legal unit had an operating margin of 32.1 percent versus 20.7 percent for the entire company. Legal has consistently set the pace for Thomson’s performance ever since the West acquisition.

But while the Eagan shop still touts the fact that 800 of its employees have law degrees, 1,400 are information technologists.

Notable among them is Peter Jackson, Thomson Reuters’ chief scientist. He says the Google analogy is “a little too simple.”

Jackson is an expert in artificial intelligence who heads a group of 40 similarly skilled R&D specialists in Eagan. Among his areas of expertise are information retrieval (search), document categorization (automated indexing of content), machine learning (the design of algorithms that enable software to learn from and make decisions based on data patterns), and natural language processing (in which software can summarize content, convert computer language into human language and vice versa, or make a computer speak with human tones).

Jackson and his group have helped Thomson introduce a stream of new products and enhancements that rely on search and related technologies. His writing about one of these products in Searcher magazine—a 2004 rollout called ResultsPlus—is a sort of manifesto on product development.