Thomson Reuters cuts engineering jobs as it expands AI across business

Thomson Reuters is cutting a small number of engineering roles even as it plans to hire more than 250 net-new engineers worldwide over the next two years, a move that shows how a company built on trusted information and software is reorganizing around AI rather than simply layering it on top of existing teams.

The layoffs were discussed in a technology staff meeting, where management linked the changes to evolving business needs and the growing role of AI in its products and workflows, according to an employee who attended. Thomson Reuters said it is focusing capacity where it matters most for customers and supporting affected colleagues through the transition. The company has not identified which geographies or teams will be hit hardest.

Based on Thomson Reuters’ 2025 annual report, the cuts could reach as many as 500 jobs, or about 1.8% of its roughly 27,100-person workforce. Within the company’s 9,400-person operations and technology unit, that would amount to about 5.2% of the division. Thomson Reuters said the new hiring will be concentrated in senior, AI-native engineering roles, signaling a shift in the mix of skills rather than a straight contraction in technical headcount.

That restructuring fits a broader pattern across the technology sector. About 120,000 tech workers had lost jobs across 228 companies in 2026 amid AI-driven changes to how software gets built. Engineers have been among the first white-collar workers exposed to automation pressure because coding tasks can be accelerated, reorganized, or partially handled by machine assistance, forcing companies to rethink which parts of engineering still require large teams and which demand fewer but more specialized staff.

Thomson Reuters has spent the past year pushing deeper into AI across its legal, tax, audit, accounting, compliance, government and media businesses. Its 2025 annual report said it expanded Thomson Reuters Labs, its research and innovation arm, and tied it more closely to product engineering to speed AI-powered development. In August 2025, the company launched CoCounsel Legal with Deep Research and agentic guided workflows, describing the product as a way for professionals to move beyond prompting and start delegating.

The company has also made the business case for that shift. In June 2025, Thomson Reuters said organizations with AI strategies were twice as likely to see AI-driven revenue growth in its Future of Professionals report. That framing helps explain why the latest cuts look less like a retreat from engineering than a reallocation of talent toward higher-value work that can support complex professional workflows and help the company defend its position in enterprise AI.