Cathie Wood says AI agent spending flows may signal the next wave of AI adoption

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said investors looking for the next major technology trend should pay less attention to where developers are spending their time and more attention to how AI agents spend money. Her point is that as AI systems move beyond answering questions and begin carrying out tasks on their own, the more revealing signal may be which services they choose, how they transact, and where their payments go. Wood said future payment activity generated by AI agents could become a better gauge of real-world adoption than product launches alone. In her view, the market will need to watch the commercial behavior of autonomous software, not just technical announcements, if it wants to understand where AI is actually gaining traction. Looking ahead to 2027, she said OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA are likely to remain at the center of competition in AI infrastructure. She also pointed to compute supply, energy, capital spending, and model reliability as the main constraints on the sector’s expansion. If AI agents are already selecting services and making payments independently, tracking those flows could become an important way to measure AI commercialization, according to Wood. The remarks were cited by CrowdFundInsider.