Artificial intelligence is creating one of the most significant shifts in corporate credit risk in recent years. While public discussion has focused largely on equity valuations, productivity gains and technology adoption, the implications for creditworthiness are only beginning to emerge.

This report examines how banks’ collective credit assessments have evolved across the AI value chain, identifying the sectors benefiting from AI investment alongside those facing growing structural pressure from automation. Drawing on Credit Benchmark’s consensus credit data, it provides a forward-looking view of where default risk is improving, where it is deteriorating, and how these trends have changed over the past three years.

The findings reveal a clear divergence.

Cloud & AI Platform Operators, semiconductor companies, networking infrastructure providers and power utilities have generally experienced improving credit profiles as investment in AI infrastructure accelerates. By contrast, sectors whose business models depend heavily on repetitive knowledge work or labor-intensive service delivery—including Customer Experience & Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), IT services, staffing and education—have seen materially weaker credit trends as automation begins to reshape demand.

The most striking contrast is between Cloud & AI Platform Operators, whose consensus probability of default has fallen 15% over the past three years, and Customer Experience & Business Process Outsourcing providers, where default risk has increased 92%. These changes suggest AI’s impact is already extending well beyond technology companies into industries that support enterprise operations across the global economy.

Importantly, the report also demonstrates that AI’s effects are not uniform. Several sectors widely expected to be disrupted – including advertising, media and publishing – have shown improving credit fundamentals, reflecting the resilience of established market leaders. Conversely, some apparent beneficiaries are beginning to show signs of increasing leverage as the cost of building AI infrastructure grows.

Rather than presenting AI as a simple story of winners and losers, the analysis highlights a more nuanced transition: one in which credit quality is diverging within and across industries as business models adapt to a rapidly changing competitive landscape.

For lenders, investors, insurers and risk managers, these trends provide an independent perspective on how AI is reshaping credit risk – and where structural change may create opportunities, vulnerabilities and emerging concentrations of risk before they become visible through traditional measures.