Cathie Wood says smart investors need to start watching where AI agents spend money

Cathie Wood has spent years telling investors to “follow the developers” when trying to figure out where technology is headed next. Now the ARK Invest CEO thinks investors may need to follow something else: the agents.

“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. She was referring to AI agents, software that can carry out tasks on a person’s behalf rather than simply answering a question or generating text.

Wood’s comment was brief, coming near the end of a wider discussion about AI, private markets and technology investing. But it points to a question that is becoming more important as companies race to build AI agents: What happens when AI stops simply giving people answers and starts spending their money?

Developers have long helped show which technologies are gaining momentum because engineers tend to gravitate toward tools they find useful. If millions of AI agents begin making their own choices about which software, services and networks to use, their activity could offer another way to see where demand is going.

But those agents will also need a way to pay.

In a post last month, Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of SharpLink and the former head of digital assets at BlackRock, argued that the financial system used by AI agents should not end up controlled by 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.

The issue, in Chalom’s view, isn’t simply whether an AI agent can spend money. It’s how much power people give that agent and who controls the financial system behind it. A person might authorize an agent to spend up to $500 booking a hotel, for example, without giving it unlimited access to a bank account. The user should also be able to cancel that authority and see a record of what the agent did.

Chalom also argued that people should be able to move their agents between financial providers rather than becoming locked into one company’s system. An agent should be able to carry its identity, financial information and permissions to another provider in much the same way a person can take a phone number from one carrier to another.