Australia's 40-Year Economic Outlook Highlights AI Impact but Omits Crypto

Australia’s new 40-year economic outlook has identified artificial intelligence as one of five major transitions expected to have a profound effect on the economy in the future, though it left out any mention of crypto.

The latest Intergenerational Report, published on Monday by the Australian Treasury, described agentic AI systems as having become “significantly” more capable, autonomous and widely used — surpassing human-level performance on some benchmarks. The other major transitions are geopolitical conflicts, an aging population, a shift to clean energy and Australia’s industrial transformation toward services.

“The Intergenerational Report makes it clear that Australia’s prosperity over the next 40 years will depend heavily on our ability to adopt new technology and lift productivity,” Coinbase Australia country director John O’Loghlen said in emailed comments. “And while the report focuses heavily on artificial intelligence, it completely misses the financial infrastructure those agents will need.”

Previous Intergenerational Reports also have not addressed digital assets. The latest omission came despite the Reserve Bank of Australia increasing its focus on tokenized finance and financial infrastructure upgrades earlier this year, while the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre estimated digital finance innovations could generate 24 billion Australian dollars ($17.1 billion) in annual economic gains.

Despite the omission, Treasury’s separate report called the “Financial Innovation Strategy,’ released on Sept. 3, does address the link between AI and financial infrastructure.

Related: Australia draft payments vision eyes stablecoin interoperability

The report said agentic systems could increase automated and machine-to-machine transactions, creating greater demand for real-time, interoperable and programmable payment systems.

“We’ve made good progress in recent years, including through the Digital Asset Platform framework, which has provided necessary regulatory clarity,” O’Loghlen added.

“The opportunity now is to bring the same focus to the tokenized stored-value facility framework for stablecoins, and clear rules for tokenized markets. Those are the rails digital finance — agentic finance included — will run on and getting them right is how Australia turns this opportunity into reality.