Can AI Understand a Distressed Credit? - Harneet Kaur, Axim Intelligence

Harneet Kaur, founder and CEO of Axim Intelligence and a former distressed credit investor, tests whether frontier models can reason about a live distressed situation: iHeartMedia. Given the same context, two top models disagreed sharply on the odds of bankruptcy versus a negotiated restructuring. Breaking the analysis into checked layers (extraction, derivation, judgment, prediction) brought them to the same answer, which raises a new question: is agreement the same as being right? Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:42 What distressed credit actually means 02:34 Why old scoring models fall short 04:30 What it means to understand a credit 05:46 Can AI predict what happens next? 06:13 Case study: iHeartMedia, and two models disagree 08:01 Benchmarking each layer of reasoning 11:07 Structured reasoning makes the models converge 12:03 Takeaways: convergence vs correctness Harneet Kaur, Axim Intelligence Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!