110 INTERVIEW From Research Assistant to agentic revolution Moody’s Cristina Pieretti highlights how agentic AI is transforming financial services with intelligent automation and decision-ready insights When OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman tweeted about ChatGPT in November 2022, it sparked a global wave of experimentation with generative AI. For Cristina Pieretti, general manager and head of generative AI solutions at Moody’s, it was a call to action. “We immediately saw the potential,” says Pieretti. “We knew generative AI could change how we work, especially in a data-rich, highly regulated environment like financial services.” That insight led to the creation of Moody’s Research Assistant, which launched in December 2023. Built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and grounded in Moody’s proprietary data, the tool quickly became a game-changer. Thousands of users from over 115 customers across the world adopted it to quickly generate insights and streamline deep financial and thematic analysis, saving up to 30 per cent of their time. But Research Assistant was just the beginning. “This product had the fastest adoption rate of anything we have launched before,” says Pieretti. “We quickly realised what a big impact generative AI was going to have on everything. We could see the benefits of its natural language capabilities and how it could be applied for many of the things we do both internally and externally. We knew we had to be ahead of the game with this.” Moody’s generative AI evolution began with a focus on surfacing insights efficiently. By mid-2023, the team had launched beta trials and customer previews. By the end of that year, Research Assistant was live, offering natural language access to Moody’s extensive data estate. In 2024, the platform expanded to include additional data sources such as news, annual reports and earnings transcripts, as well as advanced screening and insights beyond rated entities, eventually covering over 190,000 companies by May 2025. Yet as adoption grew, so did ambition. “We realised that surfacing information wasn’t enough,” says Pieretti. “The next step was to automate the entire workflow. That’s where agentic AI comes in.” Moody’s Agentic Solutions represent a leap forward in AI-driven transformation. These aren’t just tools, they’re intelligent co-workers. Built on an agentic architecture, they replicate the rigour and sequence of specialised analytical workflows, automating multi-step processes from discovery to delivery. “Agentic AI is transformational,” says Pieretti. “It’s not just about saving time, it’s about elevating the quality and consistency of decision-making.” BY ALICE CHAMBERS “ It is better to be the disruptor than the disrupted”
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