Australia's Treasury has placed artificial intelligence among five major transitions expected to reshape the economy through 2065–66, marking a significant shift from the previous 2023 Intergenerational Report. According to reports from Cointelegraph, Treasurer Jim Chalmers described the 'AI revolution' as the biggest economic transformation of the current era, stating that AI represented the most dramatic technological change since the earlier report. 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. Treasury's analysis covers automation, changing skill requirements and the potential for AI to alter how existing jobs are performed, with the government expecting Australia's economy to more than double in size by 2065–66 while real income per person is projected to rise 55%. The report maintains a 1.2% productivity baseline while acknowledging AI could move investment and labor outcomes in ways that are difficult to price decades ahead.
Despite separate government digital finance initiatives, digital assets do not appear among the five transitions Treasury selected to organize its 40-year outlook. As reported by Cointelegraph, Coinbase Australia country director John O'Loghlen criticized the omission, stating in emailed comments that the document "completely misses the financial infrastructure those agents will need." The absence of crypto from the five-transition framework does not mean the Australian government has excluded digital assets from current economic policy, with Treasury releasing a separate Financial Innovation Strategy on September 3 that explicitly addresses digital assets, stablecoins, tokenization, and AI-enabled financial services. Previous Intergenerational Reports also have not addressed digital assets, with the latest omission coming despite the Reserve Bank of Australia increasing its focus on tokenized finance and financial infrastructure upgrades earlier this year. The omission is described as an editorial gap rather than an operational one, as the money architecture for autonomous tools is being written in specialist documents rather than the main intergenerational report.
According to Cointelegraph reports, Treasury's Financial Innovation Strategy makes a direct connection between AI and payment infrastructure, stating that advances in agentic systems could increase automated and machine-to-machine transactions. The strategy describes Australia's legislated 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, with the government's Financial Innovation Strategy scheduling a digital financial market infrastructure sandbox for the second half of 2027. The strategy notes that digital finance innovations could generate ₹24 billion Australian dollars ($17.1 billion) in annual economic gains, with O'Loghlen adding that "We've made good progress in recent years, including through the Digital Asset Platform framework, which has provided necessary regulatory clarity." The strategy emphasizes that fully autonomous financial agents are still described as largely experimental, with reliability not yet good enough for most real-world money movement, explaining the split personality of policy this month where AI is a 40-year theme while crypto-style plumbing is a near-term infrastructure file.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has continued developing its tokenized-finance work separately from the Intergenerational Report, with the RBA and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre releasing final findings from Project Acacia in May, which tested 20 wholesale tokenized asset use cases across issuance, trading and settlement. As reported by Cointelegraph, the project found possible efficiency, functionality and resilience benefits but identified questions involving legal certainty, settlement design, infrastructure and regulation that require more work. The RBA opened another consultation in September examining how its Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System and Fast Settlement Service could support tokenized markets, with submissions due by October 30, 2026. The consultation focuses on settlement between traditional accounts and tokenized private money, possible stablecoin access to central-bank reserves, and future designs for tokenized reserves. O'Loghlen emphasized that "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."
The split between the thematic intergenerational report and specialist policy documents creates a dual-track approach that market participants argue understates the integration between AI agents and digital finance infrastructure. As reported by Cointelegraph, industry voices noticed the gap immediately, with a country director at a major exchange arguing that future agents will need financial systems that can support automated activity. The report maintains that people will still want simple money and will not want to know whether the agent used a deposit token or a payment stablecoin, emphasizing that the policy job is to make the exotic layer invisible and safe. The analysis suggests that five yes answers would mean the poster and plumbing files converge, while three yes answers would indicate progress with gaps, and one yes answer would mean the AI chapter was mostly rhetoric. The report concludes that forty years from now, nobody will remember the exact five labels but will remember whether income per person actually rose, whether services work got better or just faster, and whether money moved when software asked it to. The conservative approach maintains that large modeled gains get recycled fast and that tokenized real-world assets, cheaper payments, and cleaner post-trade processes do the work in the model, with the direction remaining plausible despite specific adoption scenarios.
