Martini.ai, an AI-powered credit intelligence, unveiled the Financial Autonomy Ladder, a six-level framework designed to become an industrywide standard for measuring financial institution evolution from manual workflows to fully autonomous decision-making systems: L0 – Raw Data: No AI involvement. Institutions rely on unstructured, months-old data, spreadsheets, and manual human analysis. Decision-making is slow and often based on outdated information that doesn’t reflect real-time conditions. L1 – Signals: AI produces signals from data; human produces reports and decisions. Systems produce cleaned and summarized data, generating alerts such as credit score changes or covenant breaches. However, all interpretation and decision-making is still manual, limiting responsiveness during stress events. L2 – Reports: AI produces signals, AI produces reports; human makes decisions. AI systems synthesize multiple data sources into insights using knowledge graphs and graph neural networks. martini.ai operates at this level today, delivering real-time, network-based risk analysis that empowers human analysts with machine-scale intelligence. Unlike traditional risk platforms that analyze entities in isolation, martini.ai’s graph-based approach identifies interconnected risks across complex financial networks, enabling institutions to understand systemic vulnerabilities that conventional methods miss. L3 – Decisions: AI produces signals, reports, recommends decisions; human reviews decisions. AI generates specific, actionable recommendations (e.g., “reduce exposure by 15%” or “increase credit line to $2 million”), which are reviewed and executed by humans. This level marks the beginning of semi-autonomous decision-making and creates the first major competitive moats. L4 – Actions: AI makes decisions; human provides oversight for complex cases. AI executes routine credit decisions with human oversight. From covenant monitoring to hedging and portfolio adjustments, the system acts autonomously within programmed boundaries, escalating only edge cases to humans. L5 – Policies: AI makes decisions and strategies. Fully autonomous systems that adapt strategies across economic conditions, rebalancing portfolios and shaping business models in real time. No institution operates at this level today, but the vision represents the future of self-optimizing financial infrastructure. At Level 2, martini.ai’s platform leverages cutting-edge machine learning and graph-based models to understand complex financial interconnections. It provides institutional users with AI-generated research, credit risk signals, and risk momentum across portfolios, capabilities that enable early detection of potential defaults and dynamic scenario modeling. By introducing this framework, martini.ai aims to establish a common language for discussing credit intelligence evolution across the financial services industry. The company believes that standardizing these definitions will accelerate adoption of advanced risk management capabilities and help institutions benchmark their progress.