Thomson Reuters is reducing its engineering staff while bringing in engineers who are skilled in AI.

      The meeting was a technology all-hands, which took place on Monday, and the company referred to the situation as involving “a small number of roles.” An employee who attended mentioned to Reuters that the number could be as high as 500.

      Thomson Reuters, the Canadian content and technology firm that owns Reuters News, is reducing engineering positions worldwide as it integrates artificial intelligence into its legal, tax, and regulatory offerings. The employee requested anonymity since the meeting was not open to the public.

      The figure of 500 represents approximately 1.8% of a workforce of around 27,100 employees. When looking specifically at the operations and technology division, which comprises about 9,400 people, it constitutes closer to 5.2%. The interpretation of “small number” depends on which context is chosen.

      “As customer expectations in legal, tax, and regulatory workflows evolve, we are directing our resources to areas that are most significant for our clients,” a spokesperson stated. “We are assisting affected colleagues during this transition.” The statement did not specify a number, timeline, or location.

      The same communication also mentioned that Thomson Reuters plans to add more than 250 new engineering roles globally over the next two years, predominantly for senior and AI-native positions.

      This sentence encapsulates the current state of the tech labor market in eleven words. The positions are not vanishing but are being replaced with higher-level roles that have a more selective hiring process.

      This is similar to the approach GitLab took in its restructuring for what it termed the agentic era, and mirrors the creation of new job titles over the past 18 months, which offer higher pay, demand more skills, and exist in smaller numbers than the roles they substitute.

      As of 2026, approximately 120,000 technology workers have been laid off across 228 companies, according to layoffs.fyi, which includes notable names like Meta, Amazon, and LinkedIn.

      Software engineers, previously the group most shielded from downturns and consistently rehired afterward, have now become the most vulnerable to a tool capable of writing code. The industry had spent two decades encouraging everyone else to learn programming.

      Whether this tool is the root cause remains a separate issue, one the industry approaches with caution. Mark Zuckerberg informed Meta employees that the layoffs were due to capital expenditure rather than AI-driven productivity, a notably candid acknowledgment of how the AI narrative is frequently applied retroactively. Thomson Reuters has not made such a distinction.

      It has simply combined the phrases “deploying AI” and “cutting roles” in the same announcement without further clarification.

      Over the past two years, the company has sought to redefine itself as an AI business rather than solely a database provider, incorporating assistants into Westlaw, its legal research platform, as well as its tax and accounting products.

      Legal research is quite suited for AI applications due to its extensive proprietary dataset, precise queries, and clients who bill by the hour and wish to minimize that time. The same structure applies to regulatory and tax workflows, which is why all three were mentioned in the spokesperson’s statement.

      Thomson Reuters is also the parent entity of Reuters News, which explains how a wire service reported carefully, using an anonymous source, on the redundancies affecting its owner. The story was dated “July 13 (Reuters)” and carries no identifiable byline, only the credit “Reporting by Reuters staff.”

      Investors appeared unfazed by the news. Shares of Thomson Reuters rose around 5% on Monday, making it one of the day's strongest performers, amidst a broader decrease in the technology sector.

      The company did not specify when the impacted employees will depart, in which regions this will occur, or which teams within operations and technology will be affected. It also refrained from reiterating the figure of 500, a number that has become public because someone in the meeting chose to disclose it.