Thomson Reuters’ 1 Million-User CoCounsel Bet: Give AI a Face or Lose
Most AI marketing is a funeral procession of feature lists. Thomson Reuters has 1 million CoCounsel users and still decided the product needed a mouth, an attitude and a proper brand.
Most AI marketing is a funeral procession of feature lists. Thomson Reuters has 1 million CoCounsel users and still decided the product needed a mouth, an attitude and a proper brand.
That is not a cute creative decision. It is a warning to every founder hiding behind screenshots, jargon and a bloody 47-page product deck: if customers cannot explain what you do at dinner, you do not have a brand. You have software.
Thomson Reuters is spending brand capital where most B2B firms would hide
On July 21, Thomson Reuters launched The CoCo, a personified version of its professional AI platform, CoCounsel. Played by actor Beth Dover, The CoCo is presented as a hyper-competent, slightly sharp-tongued colleague with access to more than 175 years of Thomson Reuters knowledge.
The campaign runs across television, social, streaming radio, out-of-home advertising and trade events. Thomson Reuters called it its most ambitious brand campaign in more than a decade.
Think about the contrast. The company sells into law, tax, audit, compliance and corporate teams — buyers famous for procurement committees, risk registers and killing any sentence that sounds interesting. This is not an energy drink trying to go viral with a bloke jumping off a roof. It is a serious information business deciding that serious does not have to mean forgettable.
And it has numbers behind the confidence.
CoCounsel reached 1 million users across 107 countries and territories by late July. On August 5, Thomson Reuters reported second-quarter revenue of US$1.954 billion, up 9% year on year, with organic revenue up 8%. Its three core professional segments — Legal Professionals, Corporates, and Tax, Audit & Accounting Professionals — grew organic revenue 10%. CoCounsel was specifically identified as a growth driver in all three.
Legal Professionals generated US$772 million in quarterly revenue, with 10% organic growth. Corporates delivered US$537 million, also up 10% organically. Tax, Audit & Accounting Professionals delivered US$311 million, up 8% organically.
That is the bit founders should pay attention to. The character is not being wheeled out to distract from a limp product. It is being deployed after product adoption and commercial momentum are already visible.
Brand works best when it puts a clean, memorable wrapper around a truth customers can already experience.
The actual product story is trust, not “AI”
The lazy reading of this campaign is that Thomson Reuters has slapped a mascot on a chatbot because everyone else has a chatbot.
Nope.
The product positioning is much more specific: CoCounsel is for work where being approximately right is not good enough. Legal research, drafting, tax, audit and compliance are not places for an AI to make up a citation, invent a regulation or confidently send your client into a ditch.
That is why Thomson Reuters keeps returning to words such as authoritative, cited, auditable and defensible. Its next-generation CoCounsel Legal product is designed to handle multistep legal work from a plain-language request, rather than making users babysit a long chain of prompts. The company says it built the product work around research with more than 500 legal professionals, alongside input from more than 100 Practical Law attorney editors.
This is important because nearly every AI company is claiming intelligence. Very few can make a credible claim to consequences.
If I ask a general AI to help brainstorm a landing page for Agave Finder, a duff answer is annoying. I rewrite it and move on. If a law firm uses an AI system to support case strategy or a tax team uses one to guide a filing, a duff answer can cost real money, reputation or both.
Thomson Reuters is not selling “an AI assistant.” It is selling the confidence to use AI in a room where people get fired for being careless.
The CoCo gives that dry but valuable proposition a human shape. Rather than reciting model architecture, the campaign says: here is the colleague who knows the answer, can show her work and is not intimidated by the hard stuff.
That is a far stronger memory than another blue gradient and the phrase “unlocking productivity.”
The second-order lesson: boring categories are becoming entertainment categories
For years, B2B marketers used their customer’s job title as an excuse to be dull.
“Our audience is sophisticated,” they would say, right before serving up an ad that looks like it was made by a committee trying not to upset the printer.
Sophisticated people are not immune to attention. They are usually more starved of it. A general counsel is still a person. An accountant is still a person. They watch television, scroll feeds, laugh at things and remember characters. The fact they control a bigger budget does not mean they crave generic language.
The CoCo campaign understands a basic commercial fact: rational proof gets a deal through procurement, but emotional memory gets you onto the shortlist in the first place.
That distinction matters more now because AI products are converging at the surface level. Everyone says their tool saves time. Everyone says it is secure. Everyone says it has workflows, agents, integrations and enterprise controls. Fair enough — much of that may even be true.
But if ten vendors say the same thing, the buyer defaults to one of three shortcuts: the incumbent, the cheapest option, or the one they can actually recall.
Thomson Reuters has a huge incumbent advantage through products such as Westlaw and Practical Law. Yet it is still doing the hard work of translating that heritage into a contemporary story. That is not vanity. It is defence.
A brand is not your logo. It is the shortcut someone takes when the market is noisy and they do not have time to analyse every option from scratch.
The overlooked angle: a mascot cannot rescue weak positioning
Here is where every founder should resist the urge to copy the costume and miss the lesson.
Do not go hire an actor, invent a quirky character and call it brand strategy. That is how you end up with an expensive mascot nobody understands, wandering around LinkedIn like a confused bloke at a bucks party.
The CoCo only has a chance because the underlying promise is crisp:
- CoCounsel is built for high-stakes professional work. - It is grounded in proprietary, trusted content. - It is designed to produce work professionals can check, cite and defend. - It can take on increasingly complex, multistep workflows.
You may debate the product claims, as customers should with any AI vendor. But you cannot say the company has not made a clear bet about what it wants to own in the buyer’s mind.
That is the sequence that works: product truth first, sharp positioning second, creative expression third.
Most companies do it backwards. They pick colours, write a mission statement about changing the world, then panic when nobody can tell them apart from their competitors.
Thomson Reuters has also avoided a common AI-marketing trap: pretending the technology is magic. By giving CoCounsel a personality, it makes the proposition more approachable. But the commercial message remains rooted in information, professional expertise and verification — not mystical claims that the machine will replace every lawyer by Tuesday.
That restraint may be the cleverest part.
Why this matters beyond legal AI
The real winner in AI will not necessarily be the company with the flashiest model this quarter. Models improve, prices fall and technical advantages get copied faster than most founders would like to admit.
The more durable edge is the combination of trusted inputs, workflow integration, distribution and a brand customers believe when the stakes are high.
Thomson Reuters’ results show why. Its recurring revenue represented 82% of total second-quarter revenue, and the company reported a 38.1% adjusted EBITDA margin. This is not a business hoping an AI press release will rescue it. It is using AI to deepen an existing relationship with professionals who already pay for critical information and workflows.
For investors, that is the framework worth watching. Ignore the theatrical demos for a minute. Ask four blunt questions:
1. Does the company own or reliably access the information its customers trust? 2. Is the product embedded in a workflow that is painful to replace? 3. Can the buyer explain why this product is safer or better than a general-purpose AI tool? 4. Does the brand make that difference easy to remember?
If the answer is no to all four, you may be looking at a feature, not a durable business.
What this means for you
If you run a business, do this tomorrow morning.
First, ban the phrase “AI-powered” from your homepage until you can finish this sentence: “We help [specific customer] do [valuable job] without [specific costly risk].” If you cannot write that in one breath, your customers cannot repeat it.
Second, pull five recent sales calls or customer interviews. Write down the exact moment people become anxious, confused or sceptical. That is where your positioning lives. Not in the product roadmap. Not in your internal strategy deck. In the real objection.
Third, create one memorable device that carries your product truth. It could be a character, a phrase, a visual asset, a category name or a contrarian claim. The form does not matter. Memorability does.
Fourth, make the brand promise testable. Thomson Reuters is not merely saying CoCounsel is clever; it is tying the product to trusted content and work that must be cited and defended. Your promise needs equivalent proof.
Finally, stop treating brand as the stuff you do once product is finished. Product gets you capability. Brand gets you considered. In a market flooded with AI tools that all claim to save time, being considered is half the fight.
The CoCo may look like a marketing character. The bigger play is much more serious: Thomson Reuters is trying to own the emotional shorthand for trusted professional AI before the category turns into a commodity.
That is a bet worth studying. Not because every company needs a mascot, but because every company needs to be remembered for something that matters.