Thomson Reuters has launched Open Arena, a no-code AI platform built on AWS, enabling thousands of professionals to develop customised AI solutions and transform knowledge work across sectors.
Thomson Reuters (TR), a global leader in AI and technology solutions across legal, tax, accounting, risk, trade, and media sectors, has made a significant stride in democratizing artificial intelligence through its innovative platform, Open Arena. This no-code AI platform, powered...
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Launched in early 2023 by TR Labs, the company’s applied research division, Open Arena was initially conceived as a rapid prototype developed in under six weeks to explore large language models (LLMs) in the context of TR’s rich company data. Its resounding success led to the creation of an enterprise-grade version built within the TR Enterprise AI Platform, offering secure, scalable, and standardized AI lifecycle services. This transformation underscores TR’s commitment to making AI accessible beyond data scientists to AI explorers, subject matter experts, and developers alike.
Open Arena today enjoys remarkable adoption, with approximately 70% of TR’s workforce, about 19,000 monthly active users, engaging actively on the platform. Thousands of customised AI solutions have been created without requiring programming skills, serving internal workflows or integrating into TR’s customer products. Designed as a fully self-served environment, Open Arena facilitates AI solution creation, evaluation, and deployment seamlessly for users at all skill levels.
The platform addresses critical enterprise AI challenges, including enablement through consistent LLM support and multi-user persona functionality; security and quality via robust tracking and compliance with governance and ethical standards; efficiency through reusable AI workflows and automated processes; and resource transparency with consumption tracking to ensure cost-effective AI utilisation. This versatility supports a wide array of applications from technical support and coding assistance to content creation, data analysis, and project management.
A cornerstone of Open Arena’s architecture is its cross-account design that strategically separates orchestration and user data execution to maintain stringent enterprise security and compliance. Built on serverless infrastructure using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, with orchestration managed centrally in the Enterprise AI Platform AWS account, the platform ensures isolation and privacy of user data per AWS account while delivering a seamless user experience. This architecture aligns with TR’s data sovereignty requirements and governance policies.
Technically, Open Arena integrates Amazon Bedrock for interaction with foundation models from leading AI providers such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic (with its Claude model), Cohere, OpenAI, Meta, and others. It leverages Amazon Bedrock Flows as its sophisticated visual workflow builder, enabling users to drag and drop components, like prompts, agents, and knowledge bases, to create complex AI workflows without coding. Additional AWS services like Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon S3 enhance knowledge base management and data storage respectively.
Thomson Reuters’ choice of AWS as the cloud provider for Open Arena reflects a strategic alignment based on AWS’s expansive AI/ML capabilities, advanced security controls including role-based access, single sign-on integration, and the platform’s inherent scalability and global availability. This partnership has allowed TR to rapidly extend generative AI capabilities securely across the enterprise while maintaining operational excellence.
The enterprise AI platform supporting Open Arena now comprises 15 services covering the full AI development journey, highlighting the platform’s ongoing evolution and strategic investment in AI integration. Open Arena itself has evolved from a simple form-based interface (Open Arena v1 Classic) to a powerful Chain Builder interface (Open Arena v2), harnessing Amazon Bedrock Flows for multi-step, parallel AI workflows, enhancing both flexibility and sophistication for non-technical users.
The success of Open Arena dovetails with wider AI adoption at TR, where 79% of employees globally reportedly use AI tools, supported by initiatives such as the AI Champions program that empowers super-users to advocate and train their peers. Through these efforts, TR is fostering a culture of AI experimentation and upskilling, affirming findings from its 2025 Future of Professionals Report that predicts AI will significantly impact 80% of professional work within five years, with productivity gains of up to 12 hours per week by 2029.
Beyond Open Arena, TR integrates Amazon Bedrock and Claude into its AI platforms such as CoCounsel, enhancing legal and tax professionals’ ability to synthesise expert knowledge and deliver comprehensive advice. This use extends to complex tasks like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows for document processing and expert validation to ensure high accuracy.
Looking ahead, Thomson Reuters plans to expand Open Arena’s capabilities further by driving wider adoption of its DIY solutions, adding flexible workflow components such as inline scripts, launching new templates, and enhancing collaboration features. The company also aims to extend multimodal AI capabilities and integrate additional models, continuously pushing innovation boundaries.
In summary, Thomson Reuters’ Open Arena exemplifies an effective blueprint for enterprise AI democratization, leveraging sophisticated cloud infrastructure, secure architecture, and intuitive no-code tools to empower a broad professional audience. This innovative approach highlights how strategic partnerships with cloud leaders like AWS can accelerate AI adoption and transform the future of knowledge work across diverse industries.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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