Australia’s 40-year outlook names AI, omits crypto

Australia’s 40-year economic outlook names AI among five major transitions while separate Treasury policy addresses tokenized finance.

Australia’s 40-year outlook names AI, omits crypto

Australia’s Treasury has placed artificial intelligence among five transitions expected to reshape the economy through 2065–66, while digital assets are absent from the report’s five headline themes.

Summary

Australia’s 2026 Intergenerational Report identifies artificial intelligence as one of five major long-term economic transitions.
Treasury says agentic AI systems are becoming more autonomous, capable and widely used across society.
Crypto receives no focus in the 40-year outlook despite separate government digital finance initiatives underway.
Australia’s Financial Innovation Strategy links AI agents with real-time, interoperable and programmable payment infrastructure needs.
DFCRC estimates full digital finance adoption could generate A$24 billion in annual Australian economic gains.

Treasury published the seventh Intergenerational Report on Sept. 21, covering Australia’s economic and federal budget outlook for the next 40 years. The report identifies the AI revolution, geopolitical fragmentation, the energy transition, population aging and the country’s continuing move toward a services economy as its major transitions.

The government expects Australia’s economy to more than double in size by 2065–66, while real income per person is projected to rise 55%. Average annual economic growth is expected to slow as population growth and workforce expansion lose pace, leaving productivity as a larger part of the long-run growth equation.

Australia places AI among five long-term transitions

Artificial intelligence receives a dedicated place in the latest outlook, a change from the previous 2023 Intergenerational Report. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said AI represented the most dramatic technological change since that earlier report and would become a defining influence on the economy over the coming four decades.

Treasury’s analysis covers automation, changing skill requirements and the potential for AI to alter how existing jobs are performed. The report does not assume that every productivity gain will arrive automatically, with investment, technology adoption, skills and regulatory settings remaining part of its long-term economic assumptions.

Agentic AI receives particular attention. Treasury describes newer systems as increasingly capable of acting with less direct human involvement, while AI performance has surpassed human benchmarks in several tasks. The government’s separate financial innovation work defines agentic systems as software capable of taking actions, making recommendations or performing tasks for people and businesses.

Chalmers described the “AI revolution” as the biggest economic transformation of the current era during the report’s release. Treasury retained a long-run productivity assumption of 1.2% a year, while acknowledging that AI could change productivity, investment and labor-market outcomes in ways that remain difficult to quantify decades in advance.

Crypto sits outside the report’s five headline themes

Digital assets do not appear among the five transitions Treasury selected to organize its 40-year outlook. Coinbase Australia country director John O’Loghlen criticized the omission in comments supplied to Cointelegraph, arguing that future AI agents will require financial systems capable of supporting automated economic activity.

“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,” O’Loghlen said. He argued that the report’s AI focus leaves out the financial infrastructure autonomous agents could use when making payments or conducting transactions.

The absence of crypto from the five-transition framework does not mean the Australian government has excluded digital assets from current economic policy. Treasury released a separate Financial Innovation Strategy on Sept. 3 that explicitly addresses digital assets, stablecoins, tokenization, digital money and AI-enabled financial services. Treasury described the strategy as a framework for coordinating government, regulators and industry as financial technology develops.

The strategy states that Australia has legislated a licensing framework for digital asset platforms and tokenized custody platforms, scheduled to begin on April 9, 2027. Payment reforms are expected to regulate payment stablecoins as tokenized stored-value facilities. Regulators will continue assessing legal and operational questions involving tokenized markets as those systems move toward commercial use.

As previously reported, Australia’s new digital asset licensing framework begins in April 2027, while businesses covered by existing financial-services requirements face separate licensing obligations under current law.

Treasury links AI agents with programmable payments

The Financial Innovation Strategy makes a direct connection between AI and payment infrastructure that is not central to the Intergenerational Report. Treasury states that advances in agentic systems could increase automated and machine-to-machine transactions.

Such activity could create demand for payment and settlement systems capable of real-time execution, interoperability and programmable services, according to the strategy. Treasury cautions that fully autonomous financial agents remain largely experimental and have not reached the reliability required for most real-world financial applications.

O’Loghlen said stablecoins and tokenized markets could become part of the rails used by agentic finance, while calling for clearer rules covering tokenized stored-value facilities. His comments represent Coinbase’s policy position, not a Treasury forecast that AI agents will necessarily use crypto assets.

Work elsewhere in the payments industry provides current examples of that model. Crypto.news has covered AI agents using stablecoins for automated payments through Visa-linked testing, while separate projects have explored programmatic machine payments through blockchain infrastructure.

Australia’s own payments planning has moved in a similar technical direction. As previously reported, Australia’s payment rails are being assessed for stablecoin interoperability, including possible connections between bank money and tokenized forms of value.

RBA keeps tokenized finance on its policy agenda

The Reserve Bank of Australia has continued developing its tokenized-finance work separately from the Intergenerational Report. In May, the RBA and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre released the final findings from Project Acacia, which tested 20 wholesale tokenized asset use cases across issuance, trading and settlement.

Tests covered different settlement assets, including existing central-bank balances, a pilot wholesale CBDC, commercial-bank deposit tokens and stablecoins. The project found possible efficiency, functionality and resilience benefits but identified questions involving legal certainty, settlement design, infrastructure and regulation that require more work.

DFCRC research estimates that full adoption of digital finance could generate as much as A$24 billion in annual economic gains for Australia. The estimate covers tokenized real-world assets, payments and other digital-finance applications and remains a modeled economic estimate, not realized economic output.

Crypto.news previously covered Australia’s estimated A$24 billion tokenization opportunity when the RBA moved from experimental work toward discussions about market implementation.

In September, the RBA opened another consultation examining how its Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System and Fast Settlement Service could support tokenized markets. The central bank is considering settlement between traditional accounts and tokenized private money, potential stablecoin access to central-bank reserves and future designs for tokenized reserves.

The RBA set Oct. 30, 2026 as the deadline for submissions to that consultation. Regulators plan to use the responses when assessing future RITS capabilities, while the government’s Financial Innovation Strategy schedules a digital financial market infrastructure sandbox for the second half of 2027.

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