The Autonomy Economy Is Accelerating

In this episode of Motley Fool Money, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Lou Whiteman, and Travis Hoium discuss:

• OpenAI attempting to pivot to monetization
• Investing opportunities in AI
• Autonomous taxi service Zoox starting commercial operations this year
• Where opportunities in autonomy lie
• Following oil prices, private credit, and consumer credit

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Mar 24, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: Autonomy is kicking into high gear in 2026. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe, and today, I'm joined by longtime contributors Lou Whiteman, and pulling spot duty today, we've got Travis Hoium, the host of the Wednesday and Friday shows. We're going to take the pulse of the race for autonomous, everything, really, not just driving. We're going to talk about some stories that we've been following, such as oil prices, private credit, whatever fits your fancy. But before we get started, we're going to talk about AI, specifically OpenAI. Now, guys, there's a lot of AI companies out there. Quick pulse. When you're going to use LLM or anything like that, do you have a preferred one?

Travis Hoium: Depends on what I'm using it for. Gemini is my go-to for just random questions, but I've been using Claude to build stuff a little bit more experimenting with that. Those are the two that I use. I do not open ChatGPT anymore.

Lou Whiteman: See, I'm part of the problem. Gemini, if I'm on my phone because that's just right there, but Claude, if I'm actually sitting at a desk can type on a computer.

Tyler Crowe: That gets to what we're going to be talking about here because you guys both just mentioned Gemini, Claude, which is Anthropic, and me, probably the most technologically Luddite person in their 40s, I've been going to Claude because it is incredibly useful. The topic is OpenAI because we didn't mention ChatGPT when we were talking about this nearly as much as the other ones. This is why we wanted to get into this. Last week, the company announced it was planning to double its headcount as a push to win back market share from Anthropic. Then this week, news broke that Walmart was ending its agentic commerce deal with OpenAI after Walmart said the results were not great in terms of conversions and things like that. Then there was a leak that the company was looking to raise money from private equity, and they were guaranteeing as high as a 17.5% return for preferred investments before an IPO.

Now, I know I'm probably missing quite a few headlines here, but I think what's striking is that the narrative around OpenAI has shifted from six months ago when we were talking, signs incomprehensibly large dollar figure deal with supplier to today. It's like, try to make a coherent business that makes money out of this. We even got a Sheryl Sandberg ask profile of Fidji Simo, who is OpenAI's head of product today. It was a business insider, I think, last week. This all comes when we assume, a couple of months from now that OpenAI is planning to go public. I'm sure there's a fair amount of listeners here are interested in OpenAI as a potential investment or a stock when it is available. I want to put this to you both. Based on what we've seen so far, these news stories and the shifting narrative that we're seeing with OpenAI, what would you need to see from OpenAI that would make you interested in the stock, should it go public in say, like the next 12 months? Travis, you're the fill-in guest here, so you get to go first this week.

Travis Hoium: I have got to see a real business model. I think that's always been the challenge for me with OpenAI's. How do you make money? If you look back historically on some of these phenomenal companies, so Alphabet, Microsoft, they were profitable before they ever went public. It's really a relatively new phenomenon that you have the Ubers of the world that are still burning through money a decade or more after they began, still trying to build that mass of customers, but there was a real benefit for being the aggregator, the ultimate winner. I'm not sure that's the case with artificial intelligence. If you don't have a business model to start with, you're not going to beat Google and Amazon and all these other companies in advertising, so what are you going to do? Are you going to be subscriptions? Are you going to follow Anthropic into this enterprise market? That was the thing. It's a little bit unclear.

The headlines were the 17.5% guaranteed return. What the reporting is is those were enterprise AI development deals. There would be a joint venture. But even then, if you're guaranteeing a private equity investor a 17.5% return before you get anything back from those joint ventures, that's telling you that you're not in a great position to be raising funds and I think that shows the weakness. Then Walmart backing out of their agentic AI. Many times they've thrown spaghetti at the wall, and we've found that it hasn't actually stuck. Walmart, this was supposed to be the big deal, agentic shopping. Just go into ChatGPT, say, you know what? I'm going to Florida. I need a new swimsuit, find something for me. It doesn't seem like it's working, and that's really a challenge because investors, eventually, we're still in the hype cycle. But eventally they're going to say, How are you going to actually turn this into a real business, and they don't have a great answer from what we know right now.

Lou Whiteman: That's exactly. I mean, there's a huge history here. What was it? I'm blanking on the name of that. Virtual reality company, that it was the huge whale splashing down a school gymnasium and that everybody loved this thing, and it just wasn't a business. OpenAI has nailed the parlor tricks portion of this revolution. Whether or not they can nail the actually make money off of it remains to be seen. If this ends up, and again, it seems like the Walmart experiment was, they just were getting fewer conversions. If this ends up a trillion-dollar version of the search engine that happens to burn down the rainforest every time you use it, that's going to be not money well spent. What do I need to see to be investing? I need to see that this is actually a sustainable business at a valuation that it's been assigned at something near what private equity has put in. Otherwise, if and when it does go public, those investors are going to be racing for the door, and it's going to mean it's not a very good investment for the bag holders, us last people in.

Tyler Crowe: With the numbers that they're putting out for an IPO valuation is approaching a trillion dollars, it is pretty astounding.

Lou Whiteman: Because it has to be.

Tyler Crowe: Doing so, wow, somehow not quite figured out the monetization strategy is quite astounding. Reading the tea leaves between the three, it's no secret. I think we're all a little dubious about OpenAI compared to what's going on at least from a product perspective, compared to Claude, Gemini, what el the other companies are doing this. But one thing that I do want to try to remind myself as an investor is whatever we're seeing from any of these companies, it's probably the worst version of whatever product they're going to have put out from here. It's like watching a rookie in football, basketball, baseball, whatever. It's like, this is probably the worst they're going to be for much of their career. That drives home like a challenging topic for investors looking at this space. This is an extremely fast-moving industry. Six months from now, a new AI model from any of these companies could come out and blow everything else out of the water with that in mind, like, you as investors, looking at whether it be the LLMs or the picks and shovels or whatever part of the AI universe that you're looking at. How are you approaching investing in this space right now?

Lou Whiteman: If we are moving toward commoditized models, and I think at least for the generalists, we are moving toward commoditized models, access to the consumer is what matters. That's what OpenAI is really trying to fight, the fact that they don't have this installed customer base. Alphabet, Microsoft, way out in the lead for me, they can just shove these new innovations at their existing user base, see what sticks, iterate from there, whatever they want. OpenAI ramping from zero, that's a much harder game to play. I don't know if I really want to invest in anything just based on AI glitter right now, but they're there, and it seems like the established players are the best able to profit from it, at least for now.

Travis Hoium: These big direct AI plays, I'm largely staying away. I own shares of Alphabet. That's one of my bigger positions. But that's exactly what Lou said. They own the customer base. They own the methods of distribution, things like Android, YouTube. There's tons of ways that my wife uses Google and just happens to be using their artificial intelligence tools because they just build it into search. They've got the monetization model. They have everything that OpenAI should be trying to build. The way that I'm thinking about this largely is that historically, we go through hype cycles. We go through this. It's called the Gartner Hype cycle. We go through a hype cycle, you get really high valuations. Companies eventually go public. Then the bubble burst or something happens, and the economics don't live up to that. Then high valuations that we typically put on these companies come back to reality.

That's when you get to what's called the trough of disillusionment. That's where I want to be finding those winners. That's where I want to look at who is the companies that survive the.com crash? Who's the banking companies or the solid companies that survive the great recession? When we get to that point, I'm trying to follow this closely enough that I'll be able to at least have a reasonable expectation of understanding who those winners are. But right now, I'm not really interested in buying into the hype cycle because that's typically not a great place from a risk-reward perspective for investors.

Tyler Crowe: It's a great takeaway message when you think about long-term investing. We always think about it as patiently holding something through the ups and downs, but there's also patiently buying at the right time when you're looking at certain types of investments, like you said, when you go through hype cycles, trough of illusion, things like that. After the break, we're going to do a check in on the advancements in autonomy.

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Tyler Crowe: AI and autonomy seem to go hand in hand these days in large part because AI is required to make things like autonomous driving work. It's a story we've been following quite a bit. I know, Travis, you did a show quite a while back doing a breakdown of the Holy Industry. It's a fascinating topic you want to keep checking in periodically.

Like the story we just had on OpenAI, a lot of these AI companies that are starting to pivot toward viable businesses, we're seeing this in autonomous driving and autonomous delivery as these companies are expanding their offerings at pretty drastic paces here in 2026. Waymo, just from Alphabet, they've already operating intensities with another 21 listed up next on their website. Amazon subsidiary Zoox announced that it's targeting making its autonomous taxis a paid service in Las Vegas by the middle of this year. Tesla is always lurking in the background. It's announced some ambitious plans on how many robotaxis it wants to put on the road. It's working in Austin. I think the Bay Area still right now. I haven't heard recent updates beyond that, but it's all moving pretty fast so far this year, and it's not just autonomous driving, either. Alphabet subsidiary Wing this week also announced its plan to start an autonomous drone delivery service earliest this year in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I think it's fair to say that 2026 is going to be the year where the wheat separates from the chaff in autonomy. I don't think that's going to be hyperbole here to say this is gonna be a massive year for how these things shake out. I don't think I'm being way off course here, don't you guys think? What are you seeing in the autonomy market today that excites you the most, Lou, I want to start with you.

Lou Whiteman: This is a terrible day to ask me this question, Tyler, because last night I was late for a dinner reservation because there was a Waymo trying to figure out a three point turn, and it just literally traffic stopped in both directions for.

Travis Hoium: Talk about first-world problems, Lou.

Lou Whiteman: They are everywhere. I guess, to their credit, it eventually did it. Wow, I'm talking about a driverless car trying to navigate streets. That is cool. I don't know if this is a year where the have separates from the have-nots, simply because if we're honest, a lot of the so far have-nots have done a very good job of presenting themselves as not trailing, and we're still in that phase where if you are making progress, you're still in the game. I don't think its first-mover advantage is really going to matter if you get there eventually. But I do think it's worth noting the progress that some are making.

I kidding aside, I'm very excited about Waymo and Zoox and the robotaxis that are out there. I'm less excited about Serve Robotics and delivery bots. I don't know what to think about wing drone delivery, but I think it's there. I think we need to celebrate this incremental progress. I know it's boring. I know we want to take hot takes. It's here. This is the year, whatever. But incremental is how this is going to happen. As I said, it is pretty amazing that I was watching a robot car on the streets last night trying to figure out a three-point turn, and it was just a lobby [inaudible] boring. As investors, it's close enough to pay attention to this. It's definitely we're making progress, but I don't know if we should really be expecting a payoff anytime soon.

Travis Hoium: It's wild that we were writing about this as the next big thing a decade ago. Now we're at the point where it's actually here. I think the big thing in 2026 is we're finding out who can actually do the thing. You have Waymo really starting to scale their business. They have proven the safety of their vehicles. Let's not forget Zoox is operating a vehicle that had to get approval from the government to not have a seering wheel or pedals. Tesla does not have that approval with the robotaxi that they have at least shown people.

Then you have companies like MobiliNeuro, Mobileye, there's at least a half dozen more that are testing with a safety driver today with plans to pull that safety driver potentially by the end of this year. We're really getting to that point, that show me point of can you operate in even a single city with no safety driver in the vehicle and operate efficiently and effectively? The next challenge is probably even bigger. That's what is the business model behind this? The theory with a company like Tesla was always they were going to own transportation demand forever. I think with this many suppliers, that's not going to be the case. Do these other companies have a sustainable business model? That's where I think as investors you've got to look at, should we be counting out the Uber, the Lyft, DoorDash, even retailers that have a physical location?

The hardware business is really hard and even technology hardware. If you have followed the auto industry for any period of time, you see these periods of great profitability. Stocks still go nowhere. You have low price to earnings multiples, and then eventually, a company goes bust. We're going to see the exact same thing in autonomy because I don't think that this is playing out in a winner take all space. That said, there are going to be companies that are going to get to that very real doing the thing phase by the end of this year, and that's exciting.

Tyler Crowe: This sets it up really well because you laid out the various ways that we can invest in autonomy. It's not just we have to invest in Alphabet or Amazon with their rideshare business or Tesla. There's the hardware suppliers. How would we describe Uber and Lyft? It's like a network provider app, I guess?

Lou Whiteman: The aggregators of demand would be the [inaudible].

Tyler Crowe: There's tons of ways that we can actually invest in autonomy in this. This was just, again, that was just the driving part. We could be talking about autonomous electric vertical takeoff helicopters or the replacement for that or delivery, as Lou alluded to with serve robots, lots of options, picks and shovels. We could be looking at especially component manufacturers or just the tech giants, because they're just like these little subsidiaries on a giant multi trillion dollar company. As you both look at the landscape, there's a lot of opportunities here. Where do you see the most lucrative?

Travis Hoium: Going to start with the things I think I know. If we are not going to be in a world of vertically integrating where a Waymo or a Tesla just eats everything in autonomy, I think that the companies that are aggregating that demand, the Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, any of those companies in that space are probably going to be fine. That's why we're seeing a ton of partnerships from those companies. I wouldn't be surprised if we see one get bought out, too. Does Amazon want to pull all this? They've got a ton of demand. Do they want to pull a lift in-house, really scale out their Zoox vehicles under that brand? That could be really interesting.

The other area to think about is that if we are going to this business models, there's going to be somewhere in the value chain where a modular supplier is going take a lot of value. I think an area to think about is chips in the technology stack. A company that can sell their technology and their chips to multiple OEMs. I think Mobili played that role in the original ADAS systems. But there's WeRide, AV Ride, Neuro. There's a half dozen other companies that could fall into that category, some of them are public, some of them are private. Somebody in that area we're going to suddenly find out that there's, 100 million vehicles all powered by the same company with just different badges on them. Those are the two areas that I'm looking at is that aggregation space and then the modular supplier space.

Lou Whiteman: It's interesting how similar this list is to what we were just talking about the AI, because what Travis was talking about there with Uber and Lyft is the same thing we were talking about with AI is who owns the customer. I think similarly, I mean, my boring answer here would be Alphabet. Not because I think Waymo or Wing is definitely a slam dunk, but just the optionality of having all of those ways to win plus this versus just betting on a pure play. If you want something kind of more exotic, I do think that this comes outside of the consumer faster than it does for the consumer. There's a lot of defense tech where definitely this is the Pentagon priority. I don't think they have to worry about all of those pesky safety regulators. Transportation boards if they want to roll this out. There's a handful of companies, none of which are undervalued right now, but are just leading the way on autonomy and defense tech. I think those are the first winners here.

Tyler Crowe: Coming up after the break, we're going to do a lightning round of stories that we're following in the news today. Hey, one quick note before we move on here. We wanted to make you part of the conversation here with Motley Fool Money. If you have a question about a stock or something involving investing for Travis, Lou, myself, or anyone else on the show, you can now email us at podcast@fool.com. We'd love to have mailbag segments whenever possible, so send in your questions. But remember to keep them foolish. That email again is podcast@fool.com. Finishing up, we're going to do a quick roundtable of stories that we're following what we find most interesting this week and what we'll be looking for in the next couple of months. Travis, again, the guest of the week, you have honors, what did you see?

Travis Hoium: I've got to be following oil. I haven't followed oil all that much. I have a history of writing about the industry. I know enough to be dangerous, but that's really the challenge here. Oil is up about 60% this year. We're close to $100 per barrel. We've fallen over the past day or two. But this is a huge deal in the economy, and that can really ripple across all of our investment. For the first time in quite a while, I'm waking up in the morning and one of the first things I'm checking on is what's going on with the oil markets? Are traders freaking out about what's going on in the Middle East? Do they think things are over? Because if we go back to $60 a barrel it's back to business as usual as it was just a few weeks ago. If we're going to 150 or $200 a barrel, there's a very high likelihood that a recession is coming next.

Tyler Crowe: I also want to do something commodities-related, but I didn't want to bore everyone to death with two commodities stories right in a row, cause I want to talk about L&G. I'll save that for next week. I'm going to go back to the well and talk about what I was following up from last week where I was talking about the boogeyman of private capital problems. It's been a recurring news story, I want to say, six months to a year now. What's the problems capital markets or private capital? I feel like it's been this weird place whether or not it's actually a thing or it just makes great fodder for news stories.

There was another one that came out this week where Ari's Capital is a private equity company, private capital. They were actually limiting withdrawals to about 5% of their total AUM, which again, ties into that idea like, is this really a thing? This is where I'm starting to land because there are more and more stories of limiting withdrawals in private capital versus the stories of like, debt covenants are light. It's maybe more risky than people were thinking. What I'm starting to come around to the idea is, we're seeing all these withdrawals, it reminds me a little bit. I don't want to be hyperbolic when I say this on the Silicon Valley Bank in 2022 when we were talking about deposit runs and things like that. But it does become a point where fear becomes the driving narrative, and if there's enough people wanting to get out of private capital deals with these withdrawals and everyone's always hitting the max on their withdrawals, it eventually does become a problem in and of itself versus the actual risk in the portfolio itself.

This has been something I think is fascinating and could be a much bigger story in the coming weeks or months if we continue to see these things where private capital companies are trying to limit withdrawals, and it's going to be big for companies that are publicly traded companies, thinking about the Blackstones or the KKRs of the world that have these massive private capital investments. If they have to take withdrawals, there's going to be consequences.

Lou Whiteman: The funny thing about that is that really the withdrawal limits are a feature, not a flaw. That's what makes it all possible, and it's written into the contracts. But you're spot on that whether it is or not, once the headlines start, it could become a problem, even though it's built in and that's the way it's supposed to go. I want to look at another side of lending, and this is just something watching short term and long term. One in three Americans now have an unsecured personal loan. That's a new record. I'm interested in this in part because the obvious maybe macro sign here is that the consumer is stretched and they have to get creative. I think that might be it.

But I also can't help but wonder if this is a signal that maybe an early warning sign that the age of the credit card is diminishing. I think that there's been a lot of press about credit card rates. Credit card rates have extended beyond what they were just even a decade ago. I wonder if this isn't the beginning of a long term shift that could impact profitability at a lot of the large banks if we as Americans just start using our credit cards less than we have in the past. It's more on my radar than anything, but I think a fascinating trend to watch.

Tyler Crowe: A bummer, with the three of us having slightly not the most exciting, most optimistic stories that we're following here. But hey, you know what? Maybe we'll come back next week. We'll try to be a little bit more optimistic. But that is all the time we have for today. Travis, Lou, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm going to hit the disclosure, and we'll get out of here. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisings are sponsored content provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Thanks for our producer Kristi Waterworth pulling spot duty this week and for the rest of The Motley Fool team. For Travis Lou and myself, thanks for listening, and we'll chat again soon.

Lou Whiteman has positions in KKR and Walmart. Travis Hoium has positions in Alphabet, Lyft, Mobileye Global, and Uber Technologies. Tyler Crowe has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Ares Capital, Blackstone, DoorDash, KKR, Lyft, Microsoft, Serve Robotics, Tesla, Uber Technologies, and Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends Mobileye Global and recommends the following options: short May 2026 $8 puts on Mobileye Global. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.