Thursday’s analyst upgrades and downgrades

Thursday’s analyst upgrades and downgrades DAVID LEEDER PUBLISHED 2 HOURS AGO UPDATED 26 MINUTES AGO COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. TD Cowen analyst Vince Valentini expects Thomson Reuters Corp. (TRI-T -0.16% decrease ) to be one of the “beneficiaries of AI, as opposed to SaaSpocalypse casualties.” In a client report released Thursday analyzing international information services providers that coincided with his initiation of coverage of Dutch multinational Wolters Kluwer N.V. and London-based RELX plc (with “buy” ratings for both), he emphasized all three possesses “proprietary content and deeply embedded workflows that form the trust layer and/or system of record for professionals who need to embrace the efficiency benefits of Agentic AI.” Accordingly, he thinks all three stocks have been “meaningfully oversold in the past year,.” “The overselling has occurred in spite of the lack of evidence of disruption to near-term revenue growth or margins,” he explained. “We view TRI as the highest quality name in this subsector, and our pecking order is TRI, RELX, and WKL. Mr. Valentini thinks Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw legal research platform and RELX’s LexisNexis have “material competitive advantages that stem from embedded research workflows (high switching costs), unmatched editorial depth, and fiduciary-grade reliability.” “They own not just legal documents, but decades of human legal reasoning, editorial analysis, citation networks, and validation supported by thousands of courts,” he said. “In law, accuracy matters, and being correct 95 per cent of the time is insufficient. WL and LN form the trust layer of the legal profession. “As AI adoption accelerates, customer priorities have converged on accuracy, explainability, and privacy. This favors incumbents with proven content ownership, curation, and the capital to invest in secure, compliant AI systems. Our proprietary survey work shows that legal professionals deem reliability and accuracy to be the most important aspects of AI services. There are major consequences for getting it wrong . Therefore, we have yet to see any evidence of disruption to legal segment revenue growth at either TRI or RELX, despite big claims of both revenue growth and capabilities by AI native players over the past 12-18 months. We remain confident that meaningful TAM growth (as the legal profession embraces the use of…