Where's your list of the things that could go right? Where's your opportunity risks?
1. Episode 120 of the Mastering Risk Management podcast features Chris Maguire of Thomson Reuters discussing AI, compliance and risk with host Anthony Wilson.
2. Maguire is Head of Product and Industry for Corporates at Thomson Reuters, which he joined in 2005 after about six years as an auditor at PwC, and he previously ran corporate risk products including CLEAR.
3. The central thread is that compliance and risk functions are moving from the back of the house to the front, and that AI is only as reliable as the content it runs on.
4. Maguire describes Thomson Reuters as a company of roughly $7-8 billion in revenue whose largest segment is legal (Westlaw), alongside tax software and risk offerings such as CLEAR, with Reuters news a small share of revenue.
5. Wilson raises the Australian government's $440,000 purchase of a big four firm's report that was allegedly mostly AI-written with fake references, and Maguire responds that AI run "willy nilly" invites problems like lawyers citing fake cases.
6. Maguire says Thomson Reuters spends $200 million a year on internal AI development, including the CoCounsel legal tool that works on content curated over 150 years and is also used by HR staff to draft policies.
7. Both discuss how past contracts can be searched for limits of liability, how third-party risk should be tiered (the water delivery vendor versus Microsoft), and how risk products have shifted from post-incident investigations to front-end prevention.
8. Wilson, a former chief audit executive, argues that an incident signals a control failure, so organisations should ask which control failed, whether to add one, and whether to rewrite the risk, while excluding every "paper cut".
9. Maguire cites a Thomson Reuters study in which about half expected AI to transform their corporate future but only 19-20% had a strategy, and says the best results combine top-down strategy with bottom-up experiments such as AI summarising 150-200 page documents.
10. Suited to risk, compliance and legal professionals weighing AI adoption.
