Many of these features will go to support the company's Expert AI solution throughout its product lineup, including Wolters Kluwer Tax and Accounting. Under the agreement, OpenAI models will power agentic workflows embedded directly in CCH Axcess to automate tasks such as gathering client data, classifying documents and completing preparation steps that traditionally require manual effort.
"This collaboration accelerates our Expert AI vision — bringing trusted AI to the professional workflows of clinicians, lawyers, accountants and other experts, who rely on Wolters Kluwer in high-stakes environments," said Alex Tyrrell, head of advanced technology for Wolters Kluwer. "By combining OpenAI's latest enterprise capabilities with our Expert AI, curated content, deep domain workflows and the guardrails of our Responsible AI Principles, we are scaling purpose-built AI to support critical professional decision-making."
Wolters Kluwer has already spent a great deal of time and money developing its own native AI capacities, having long embedded the technology across its portfolio for document review, workflow automation and advisory insights. Further, CCH Axcess already supported AI-driven workflow automation features such as data collection and document classification. Tyrell, in an email, said this deal is more about accelerating and scaling them versus replacing them. OpenAI strengthens the model and platform layer; while Wolters Kluwer provides what foundation models alone cannot: expert-curated content, deeply embedded workflows, and the auditability regulated work demands. Meanwhile, Wolters Kluwer remains fully in control of product, data, governance and customer experience.
"The collaboration enhances these existing capabilities by introducing more advanced generative and agentic AI, accelerating rollout and scale across customers and use cases, and through WK's Expert AI architecture, FAB, improving consistency, grounding and traceability. The bottom line is that this is an evolution and acceleration of capabilities already in place, not a reset," he said.
This is enabled by the company's longstanding model-agnostic approach, which makes use of multiple foundation models. This collaboration, said Tyrell, simply adds OpenAI as a key collaborator rather than an exclusive provider. The company will continue to select the best model for each use case, maintaining flexibility as the technology evolves.
"Put simply, Wolters Kluwer is model-agnostic by design, and OpenAI enhances its toolkit rather than replacing it," he said.
For example, he noted, the collaboration enables faster and more responsive performance, with new models improving both speed and user experience. It also enhances capability, supporting more sophisticated agentic workflows and reasoning, while improving scalability through faster deployment across products and geographies via the FAB platform. In addition, he said, there can be cost efficiency gains in certain use cases, depending on the specific model improvements and system architecture.
He added that the deal will also enable new kinds of workflows and data processing, particularly around multistep agentic workflows and orchestration in products like CCH Axcess, along with improved document understanding and classification at scale and a greater ability to orchestrate end-to-end processes rather than simply automate individual tasks.
"The bottom line is that this is not just about doing the same tasks faster, but about coordinating more of the workflow autonomously within governed guardrails," he said.
