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Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached a point where its rapid advances could reshape business and credit markets, a Moody’s Ratings report released this week said.

The report, published on Thursday, 4 September, lays out three possible scenarios for the technology through 2030 and assigns probabilities to each. The analysis stresses that how firms integrate AI, and how governments regulate it, will determine whether the impact is incremental, transformative, or systemic.

Moody’s analysts Charleyne Biondi and Vincent Gusdorf said the latest frontier models, including OpenAI’s o3, Anthropic’s Claude 4 and Alphabet’s Gemini 2.5, have raised expectations. These systems “outperformed previous benchmarks in areas such as reasoning, memory, coding, and the ability to process images, audio and video.”

They noted that both technical breakthroughs and falling compute costs are expanding adoption. “Today’s leading AI models can perform a wide range of intellectual tasks with greater accuracy, fluency and adaptability,” the report said.

Still, Moody’s cautioned that business integration remains slow and uneven. The report highlighted five major frictions: complex integration with aging IT systems, rapid technological evolution that risks obsolescence, security and compliance concerns, a shortage of trained staff, and regulatory uncertainty.

“Addressing these frictions—not just technical capabilities—will shape how and when AI can be deployed at scale,” Moody’s said

The first of the three scenarios Moody’s outlined assumes progress in AI model development stalls after 2025, with only incremental improvements.

Adoption would nonetheless continue as firms embed AI into specific workflows. The report described this as a conservative but plausible trajectory, noting that “AI becomes more about optimization than disruption, delivering marginal gains rather than breakthroughs.”

In this outlook, firms use AI mainly as assistants for knowledge management, low-code automation, compliance, and document generation.

The credit impact would be modest and concentrated in companies with the resources to integrate AI effectively.

“AI under this scenario would act less as a universal productivity engine than as a catalyst, or differentiator, that amplifies existing advantages,” the authors wrote.

The second and most probable scenario foresees steady progress in AI capabilities, with models able to execute extended, multi-step tasks with minimal oversight.

By 2030, systems would be capable of applying knowledge across contexts and running longer processes in areas such as finance, logistics, and healthcare.

Moody’s said the likelihood of this scenario is 50%. Here, AI would become embedded into departments, with humans primarily supervising rather than executing tasks.

“Instead of helping with isolated tasks, they begin to run entire processes across departments,” the report said

Such progress would hinge on improvements in training techniques, computing efficiency, and standardized interfaces that lower integration costs.

Governance hurdles and organizational resistance, however, could slow uptake.

Moody’s warned that regulatory fragmentation across countries would remain a barrier. The credit effects, the report said, would be “broad uplift, but uneven benefits and higher dependency risks.”

Productivity gains could widen gaps between early adopters and laggards, while growing reliance on a handful of AI vendors would increase systemic vulnerabilities.

“Over time, this shift raises the risk that a growing share of enterprise value migrates from end-users to a concentrated set of AI infrastructure and model vendors,” Moody’s said.

The third scenario imagines the emergence of artificial general intelligence, or AGI—systems capable of performing a broad range of intellectual tasks at or above human level.

Moody’s put the probability of this outcome by 2030 at just 10% but warned that it is no longer implausible.

The report defined AGI as a fundamental break from current technology, requiring breakthroughs in self-improvement, long-horizon planning, and cross-domain reasoning.

“Even if improbable over such a short time-span, AGI would carry systemic consequences for economies, societies and credit markets that are too significant to ignore,” Moody’s said.

In this outlook, AI would evolve into autonomous decision-making agents capable of strategic planning and knowledge integration without human oversight. The consequences would be profound: disruption of labor markets, reconfiguration of governance systems, and a bifurcation of credit risks across firms and sovereigns.

Some countries and companies could harness exponential productivity gains, while others would face obsolescence. Moody’s warned that AGI could blur traditional boundaries between capital and labor and trigger “intense debates around oversight, risk governance, ethics, and global coordination.”

The risks of this scenario include safety challenges, unpredictable behavior from self-improving systems, and the concentration of power in a few firms or countries.

Governments might be forced to intervene to stabilize economies, provide income support, or contain security threats.

“Poorly governed and insufficiently monitored AGI deployments could expose firms and governments to large-scale vulnerabilities, from AI-enabled cyberattacks to chain reactions of system breakdowns,” the report said.

For now, Moody’s stressed that the trajectory of AI is still uncertain and uneven.

The report concluded that AI is likely to act as a multiplier of firm-level strengths, widening the gap between leaders and laggards.

“Under our second scenario, AI is no longer a marginal differentiator. It becomes a structural input for productivity—redefining how firms allocate capital and organize operations,” Moody’s said.