Thomson Reuters Corporation (Thomson Reuters), a global content and technology company, announced last week the acquisition of Materia, a US-based startup specialising in the development of an agentic AI assistant for the tax, audit, and accounting professions. This move is part of Thomson Reuters' strategy to accelerate the development of generative AI tools tailored for these sectors, according to the official release.
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Materia and Its AI Assistant
Founded in 2022, Materia is purpose-built for tax, audit, and accounting use cases. Its agentic AI assistant automates and augments research and workflows, helping accountants improve efficiency and effectiveness while delivering greater value to clients, the official release said.
"Our vision is to provide each professional we serve with a Gen AI assistant. Materia will further accelerate this vision for our tax, audit and accounting customers," said David Wong, Chief Product Officer, Thomson Reuters. "Once fully integrated, Materia will transform work and unify the entire customer experience with applications across our tax, audit, and accounting portfolio. We are excited by the potential of combining Materia with Thomson Reuters content, know-how, and solutions."
"Materia is defining the future for how agentic AI can enhance the accounting profession. Our vision is to eliminate low-value, tedious tasks, and in doing so, both increase quality, and free up accounting teams to focus on higher value advisory work for their clients, said Kevin Merlini, CEO of Materia. "By combining, we will be able to move more quickly toward this objective and will unlock new opportunities to deliver highly-requested solutions for our customers."
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Previous Collaboration and Results
Thomson Reuters Ventures, an early investor in Materia, previously launched a proof-of-concept initiative that allowed select Checkpoint Edge users to engage with specific Checkpoint content through Materia's AI assistant.
"The promising initial results from this work provides confidence that Thomson Reuters and Materia together can best leverage generative AI to deliver value for Thomson Reuters tax, audit and accounting customers," the companies said in a joint statement.
Generative AI in Accounting
According to the official release, Materia is the first comprehensive generative AI platform built specifically for public accounting firms. It is built on a proprietary library of authoritative accounting content, integrated with firm knowledge and key industry software.
