Cathie Wood: Track AI Agent Payment Flows as Next Adoption Gauge

Wood's framing matters because it shifts the adoption metric from inputs to actual economic activity: where autonomous software transacts, rather than how long humans spend building it. That reframes how the market may eventually read infrastructure and payment rails positioned for machine-initiated flows, and it raises questions about whether existing settlement and compliance systems can attribute spend to agents at all. Whether agent payment data becomes a credible, comparable gauge — rather than a patchwork of platform-specific numbers — is the open question.