Thomson Reuters’ Ray Grove says trade compliance is no longer a back-office specialty. As tariffs, classifications and reporting obligations move faster, companies need scarce judgment closer to the business.
The trade risk is not just that the rules keep changing.
It is that many companies do not have anyone close enough to the business who can tell them what those changes mean before the business acts.
That should matter to legal. Trade may sit in tax, finance, procurement or supply chain. But when a classification decision is wrong, a tariff assumption fails, a reporting obligation is missed or an audit turns ugly, the issue rarely stays neatly inside that function. It becomes a governance problem, a cash-flow problem, a disclosure problem or a boardroom question.
Ray Grove, who leads Thomson Reuters’ global tax and trade portfolio, puts the problem plainly. Many companies can identify their advisers. They know the broker. They know the consultant. They may even have someone who has passed the customs broker exam.
What they may not have is durable internal trade expertise sitting close enough to the business to interpret change as it happens.
That is the empty-chair problem.
Someone can forward the alert. Someone can call the broker. Someone can ask outside counsel or a consultant what changed. But who inside the company can translate a new duty, classification issue or reporting obligation into consequences for products, suppliers, margins, contracts, filings and risk?
The answer is often less clear than it should be.
For years, that ambiguity was easier to tolerate. Trade compliance was specialized, technical and often treated as work in the weeds. Important, yes, but not always central to enterprise strategy. That distinction is disappearing.
Tariffs can change the economics of a product overnight. Classification decisions can change what a company owes. E-invoicing and continuous transaction controls are pushing compliance closer to the moment business happens. Governments want more information, more frequently, with less distance between the transaction and the report.
The work is specialized. The talent is scarce. The rule set does not sit still.
Grove’s most useful point is that trade is not a lookup problem. The customs broker exam is open-book for a reason. The hard part is not finding the rule. The hard part is applying it correctly to a real-world fact pattern.
That distinction matters because companies are being sold a lot of AI as if every professional problem were a search problem with a better interface.
It is not.
A general model can summarize, draft and organize. It can be useful. But trade compliance is not casual knowledge work. The wrong answer can move through the business as a bad sourcing decision, a missed duty, a flawed classification, a reporting failure or a surprise exposure that arrives later with interest, penalties and reputational consequences attached.
So the AI question is narrower than the hype suggests.
Can it help a company close the trade-expertise gap without creating false confidence?
That depends on what the system is built on, where it sits in the workflow, what content it can rely on, how it handles customer context and whether the output is designed for professional work that has to be defended later.
That is where Grove’s argument becomes more useful than the usual agentic AI pitch. The point is not that an agent can move faster than a person. The point is that scarce judgment has to be made more available at the moment the business needs it.
That does not make AI the trade expert. It makes AI part of the governance architecture around a function where too many companies are underbuilt.
For legal departments, the first question is not which tool the company is using. It is whether anyone has mapped the decision path.
When a tariff changes, who sees it?
Who decides whether it affects the business?
Who knows which products, suppliers, jurisdictions, contracts, filings and assumptions are implicated?
Who has the authority to escalate?
Who can explain the decision later?
If the answer is a consultant, a broker, an email chain or “We’ll find out,” that is not merely a staffing issue. It is a risk signal.
Trade policy now extends to supplier strategy, product economics, reporting systems and executive decision-making. The people who understand that intersection are scarce. The consequences of not understanding it are growing.
The empty chair will be filled. Companies will fill it with people, process, outside advice, technology or some combination of all four.
The governance question is whether they fill it deliberately, before the next change moves through the business or discover the gap later, when a decision made in the ordinary course has become something the company has to explain.
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Ray Grove leads Thomson Reuters’ global tax and trade portfolio, including its OneSource solutions and related compliance products. His work focuses on how companies manage tax, trade, regulatory change and professional risk inside complex global operations. Grove is helping shape Thomson Reuters’ use of CoCounsel and AI-enabled workflows across tax and trade, where trusted content, domain context and defensible decision-making matter.