Just caught Thomson Reuters up nearly 12% today and it's actually a pretty interesting case study in how the market's treating AI right now. The company announced that a million legal professionals are now using CoCounsel, their AI legal assistant, and apparently that's enough to spark a rally after months of getting absolutely pummeled.

Here's the thing though - TRI stock has been crushed over the past year, down almost 50%, caught in that broader software sell-off where everyone's worried AI will just obsolete these tools. But now we're seeing the flip side: companies that actually integrate AI successfully start attracting real user adoption. CoCounsel does the heavy lifting on legal research, speeds up litigation work, and plays nice with tools lawyers already use like Westlaw and Practical Law.

The CEO's quote stuck with me - professionals aren't debating whether to use AI anymore, they're just picking which one they trust. That's a meaningful shift in the conversation. And given Thomson Reuters has 175 years of content and validation logic built in, there's actually defensible moat here that pure AI startups might struggle to match.

What's wild is how fast sentiment can flip. Anthropic dropped new legal AI tools earlier this month and TRI stock tanked. Now this adoption milestone comes out and boom, 12% pop. The market's clearly still figuring out which software companies will thrive in an AI world versus which ones get disrupted.

Trading at 27x trailing earnings right now, which is way below the five-year average. Company grew adjusted earnings 4% last year with 7% organic revenue growth, guiding for solid growth in 2026. But here's where it gets tricky - what's the right valuation multiple when AI potentially breaks down barriers to entry? That's the real question investors need to answer. David Thomson's family has built this into a powerhouse over generations, and seeing the company adapt to AI rather than get disrupted by it is probably worth watching if you're looking at beaten-down tech plays.

The stock market rewards companies that navigate transitions, not ones that ignore them. Thomson Reuters seems to be doing the former.