Cathie Wood Tells Investors to "Follow the Agents" as AI Starts Doing the Spending 🧾

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said investors may need to start tracking AI agents as closely as they track software developers, arguing that autonomous software spending will become a leading indicator of where technology demand is heading. "We're probably going to be talking more and more about 'follow the agents,'" Wood said during a panel at Robinhood's Summit in Houston on Wednesday. The comments came near the end of a wider discussion about AI, private markets and technology investing.

The shift Wood described reflects AI agents moving from answering questions and generating text to executing tasks on a user's behalf, including making purchases. As companies race to build these agents, the focus is turning to what financial infrastructure will support machine-driven commerce, including payments for data, computing power and other digital services. Stablecoins and blockchains are being weighed as candidate payment rails for that activity, according to industry executives.

Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of SharpLink and the former head of digital assets at BlackRock, argued in a post last month that the financial system used by AI agents should not end up concentrated among a small number of banks or technology companies. "A world full of intelligent agents means nothing if a handful of companies decide where your money can go," Chalom wrote in the final installment of a three-part series on agentic finance. He framed the debate as extending beyond whether an agent can spend money to who controls the rails behind it and how much authority users delegate to software.

The emerging contest, according to Chalom and other experts, is over whether agentic finance develops on open networks or becomes consolidated within a few banks, payment providers and technology platforms. Chalom cited scenarios such as a user authorizing an agent to spend up to $500 booking a hotel without granting unlimited access to a bank account, with the user retaining the ability to revoke that authorization.