After consumer-grade AI hit the market in late 2022 with OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, Thomson Reuters Chief People Officer Mary Alice Vuicic says she knew the biggest constraint to adopting artificial intelligence enterprise-wide would not be the technology. “The constraint is change management and leadership and talent,” she says. She quickly moved to have tech and HR functions work side-by-side on the company’s AI efforts, theorizing “we’ll drive adoption, we'll be able to do better workforce planning and minimize the disruption to the organization, and we’ll deliver value faster for the investments that we're making.”
She’s been right. “That has absolutely borne out over the last two and a half years,” she told M1 editorial director Jena McGregor in a recent conversation. Below, Vuicic shares the five “Ts” that have been essential in the company's rollout, the leadership behaviors that matter most in an age of AI, and why this is HR’s biggest moment, ever. The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
So you talk about four “Ts” that have been important in driving AI adoption. What are those?
We started with the tone from the top. We made it clear that this is critical to the business and it's critical for individual colleagues to stay relevant in this fast-evolving workplace. We had the CEO kicking off our very first global learning day, we had I think 12,000 people participating.
The next important piece was secure access to tools. We created a ‘sandbox’ that included four large language models and other tools. We call it Open Arena. Everybody in the company has access to those tools and is encouraged to use them on a daily basis. Now we're expecting they're used daily.
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The third T is training. And then the fourth is Time—to experiment and use the tools, because we want to take away all of the reasons why people can't adopt AI. We supported that with hundreds of AI champions around the globe in all functions who are super users. They're early adopters who have embedded AI into how they work. That’s been a really critical part of the bottoms-up engagement.
I would probably add a fifth ‘T’ now, which is transparency. We've been developing products with AI for 30 years, but this is different. Consumer-grade, generative AI has changed our business. It's going to change our investment strategy—everything. And it will drive the most significant changes in the workforce that any of us have ever seen. It will happen faster than any of us have ever seen.
Have you looked at what leadership behaviors are driving success with AI?
Adaptability is No. 1, and that has changed how we hire and what we're looking for. Things are evolving so quickly. It's less about a hard skill you have or the education you have. It’s how you have demonstrated adaptability.
When I said tech is not the constraint, talent is—that includes change management. Really thoughtfully designed change management to support adoption and capture the ROI from the AI investment and tools.
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On the leadership side, it is first and foremost about mindset—leaning into ambiguity and change. The outcomes are not clear now. It’s the most uncertain time. You’re seeing huge transformation across all sectors. Winners and losers are not determined. There will be change at a scale and pace that I don't believe we've seen in modern work. The internet, e-commerce, mobile—combine all those. This is bigger. It's going to have a much greater impact on work. On business models. I was in retail and consumer packaged goods when e-commerce began. I was in book retailing when that started. This is way beyond all of that.
We’re looking at leaders who have the right mindset, who are adaptable, who are transformative, who can manage change and who bring tech fluency or curiosity. We say now that leaders lead a workforce of people and technology. That's a mindset shift, right? You have to think: How do I optimize for both? How do I design work to leverage humans for what humans do best … and how do I use technology to do all the other stuff to help increase the quality and improve the productivity of what humans do? That’s a huge shift for leaders.
Thomson Reuters is in the information business. Has that given you an advantage in adopting AI?
I think a few things that differentiate our business. One: We were developing products leveraging AI—we’ve had experts in this field—for over 30 years. On the information side, we have highly curated editorialized content, which is ideal for training machines. [We’ve had] decades, decades and decades of some of the most complex content like legal documents. That enabled us to have more accurate output. We also serve customers who are in some of the industries that research has been saying from the outset are the most likely to be disrupted or changed because of AI. We must move with speed.
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The other thing that I don't think people talk about enough is we had high organizational health. We track our organizational health; we track leadership sentiment. We have high trust in our organization and we put a high emphasis on mental health and wellbeing. In a cognitive area, when you're dealing with so much change, you want people to feel psychological safety—[that] it is okay to say 'I actually don't understand that.'
The No.1 thing I hear from new people joining our culture is the people are really smart and it's a very supportive environment. I think that those are key contributors to rapid and successful adoption of new ways of working.
How far along in your AI journey would you say Thomson Reuters is now?
I would say our product and tech talent working on AI—our labs talent and the people building and shipping and designing our AI-enabled products and agenda—are world-class. I put them up against the best out there. Just outstanding talent. We've been incredibly impressed and proud of what they're doing and we've had great feedback from our customers.
On internal adoption, it's a jagged edge of adoption and performance in some areas. I'd be surprised if any company said anything else. I'm super proud about my HR team and how we're progressing there. Super proud of the communications team. As I look across the organization, I think some of the areas where most companies are doing better because there's mature tools, well-proven use cases, and easier adoption include engineering and customer service.
How mature, specifically, would you say [the company is with AI] in HR?
It varies by process. I would say case management and workforce planning—pretty advanced. In recruiting we’re early. We're doing a lot around the administrative portions of talent acquisition, which is a lot of the process. There's more we can do around prioritizing candidates for human-to-human interviewing and starting to use agentic AI in that process, which is super exciting. I think we are at least in the top quartile broadly.
When I talk to my peers and when we bring top talent in, there are still companies that are not allowing people to use AI tools in their daily work. I think that's going to be tough. Top talent wants to stay relevant. We hear that all the time—'I need to stay relevant. What else can you do to help me stay relevant right now?’ They feel the urgency. They see what's going on around them. … We expect everybody to be using the tools on a daily basis by the end of the year. And we provide reporting and tracking on that from individuals and their bosses. I think we've got some areas of strength. There's still lots to do.
What do you feel like is one of your biggest lessons you would give to your peers who may be earlier in their journey?
I think this is the biggest opportunity ever for HR professionals—ever—to be at the table and positively influence the performance, survival, and success of their companies. There's a societal impact as well. I'm very optimistic: I think that this is going to result in positives for humanity overall. But I think it will happen at a pace that has not been seen before in terms of technological disruption. And so HR has a unique role to play in supporting individuals, companies, and society through this. The pandemic? The Great Resignation? All of that was the warm-up for this. It's HR’s time to stand up.
