Moody’s guards against risk with decision-grade intelligence live in Copilot

The risk landscape is changing

The speed of markets, innovation, and decision-making has increased exponentially since the proliferation of AI, but the trust that underpins well-functioning markets has not. For financial services professionals making decisions about lending, portfolio management, and underwriting, AI tools give them the ability to compress days and weeks of research and analysis into a matter of minutes while embedded directly into the workflows they’re working in. At the same time, the scrutiny of those decisions is intensifying against the backdrop of technological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, and market volatility.

Moody’s, the New York–based financial services company founded in 1909, is uniquely equipped to understand the pressures that leaders and markets face. For over a century, Moody’s has been providing independent, analytically rigorous credit assessments to help investors and global capital markets make better, more-informed decisions. More than 100 years later, Moody’s analysis is still critical for helping the market understand creditworthiness. Since 2007, through its Analytics business, the company has evolved to help the world’s leading banks, insurers, asset managers, and corporations understand and manage all sorts of risks that could impact their business. That includes cybersecurity threats, supply chain, extreme weather, macroeconomic volatility, and much more.

“In an era of exponential risk, customers need a 360-degree view of how risks intersect in real time—decision-grade, credentialed intelligence contextualized to how risk shows up. For this, AI needs input that’s trusted, governed, and explainable, embedded at the point of the decision. That’s where 100-plus years of data and human judgment comes in,” says Rob Fauber, Chief Executive Officer, Moody’s.

Moody’s century of credit intelligence is now activated for the agentic era. Governed, connected intelligence is available at the exact moment of decision, embedded directly into the everyday work customers already do.

Meeting customers where they already work  

Moody’s understood how customers use its products and services. But the issue has become where they want to access those products. “I hear constantly from our customers how challenging it can be to adopt yet another user interface, another new technology. That’s why Moody’s has prioritized meeting our customers where they already work, and Microsoft is a trusted platform that allows us to accomplish this goal,” says Ben Holloway, Senior Director, Global Strategic Partnerships & Business Development, Moody’s. With roughly 350 million people working across Microsoft tools daily, bringing Moody’s intelligence into those workflows was a natural next step.

One connector, data in near real time 

The two companies worked together to make proprietary Moody’s intelligence accessible in Microsoft 365 Copilot through a federated connector architecture using Model Context Protocol (MCP). Now users can directly access live Moody’s connected intelligence and decision-grade intelligence via Researcher, the advanced reasoning agent inside Copilot, and natively in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft Teams.

One connector fronts data that was once siloed, so a single question can synthesize credit ratings, company financials, ownership information, and physical risk models, facilitating a customer’s access to insights in minutes rather than hours or days of research and analysis.

“Before AI, bringing 100 years’ worth of Moody’s intelligence, insights, and analytics into our customer environments was a project that could take months or even years,” recalls Trevor O’Brien, Managing Director of Engineering and Innovation, Moody’s. “Now, with MCPs and agentic AI technology, we can inject Moody’s intelligence right where the customer is already working.”

For Moody’s, this is more than a technical shift. It’s a strategic one. Copilot is capable of delivering targeted information, in-depth research, and credit rating data directly into the user’s Microsoft tools. This helps protect Moody’s intellectual property and data while also giving its customers immediate access to that information when and where decisions get made.

Fauber says, “From day one, purpose and culture were aligned between us and Microsoft. Microsoft has a strong enterprise orientation and understands what drives the world’s most sophisticated and regulated organizations. Everything we do at Moody’s is anchored to trust given the companies and industries we support—trust we felt that Microsoft would help amplify.”

Moody’s runs on Copilot, too

Moody’s sees the same operational impact among its own employees. “To do an executive briefing now, I can have Copilot look at relevant emails, PowerPoint presentations, files in OneDrive, and files on SharePoint, and I can create a document in a matter of minutes,” Holloway explains. He can then layer in Moody’s own intelligence while staying in the document in front of him. 

Back in 2023, Moody’s and Microsoft partnered together and rolled out Copilot tools to the entire firm at once. By giving all 14,000 employees access at the same time, the firm was able to speed up the pace of innovation and efficiency internally and produce customer use cases much faster. Moody’s took the same approach with Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft’s agentic tool, in 2025. This bottom-up approach to innovation is a shift from how most financial services firms handle tech deployment. This decision has allowed Moody’s to better serve customers, reimagine workflows, and cut unnecessary layers of work, all while keeping its underlying data and methods well protected and maintaining the analytical rigor that is its hallmark. 

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