The Morning Download: Enterprises Are Getting More Comfortable with AI Agents

Good morning. Companies are thinking very differently about AI than they were at this time last year.

When the WSJ Technology Council convened in Palo Alto one year ago, Belle Lin’s story proclaimed that “AI Agents Are Everywhere … And Nowhere.” This year AI agents are everywhere, and while their evolution and adoption are still very much a work in progress, the sense that they are “nowhere” has passed.

During a peer discussion on AI agents at yesterday’s WSJ Technology Council Summit in Palo Alto, Calif., CIOs and other technology leaders from large enterprises said that agents were in wide deployment with significant adoption by employees. We’ll be going into that dynamic in greater depth as the summit continues today.

The Summit kicked off just one week after anxiety tied to the growing power of AI coding agents wiped more than $300 billion worth of value in software and data stocks. The selling was sparked by recent advances in Anthropic’s Claude Code. On Jan. 12, the company announced Cowork, a research preview feature in Claude’s desktop app that lets users assign multistep tasks to Claude such as organizing files, drafting documents, extracting data from spreadsheets or synthesizing research.

The fear is that AI will, at the least, lower their strategic value in the tech world and depress their margins. And that dynamic could ripple across the economy from one industry to another, forcing companies to figure out how to adapt to a new world or wither and perhaps die.

But attendees at the Tech Council Summit seemed to appreciate the stakes, according to Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of vibe-coding pioneer Replit.

“I think your audience is actually fully understanding the moment we're in. It's pretty insane,” Masad said. Replit is an AI-powered, cloud-based platform that enables users without advanced technical skills to build applications within a browser.

But rather than vibe-coding their own software to make vendors like Salesforce irrelevant, Masad said large enterprises are more likely to vibe-code tools that work with Salesforce.

“They want to create their own processes, their own workflows, their own agents, their own automations on top of that,” Masad told WSJ Leadership Institute President Alan Murray during a conversation onstage.

More below from Tuesday's Tech Council Summit in Silicon Valley.

When it comes to being a CIO nowadays, there’s a lot more at stake than just AI usage and AI models. According to Chris Jordan, a senior performance coach and adviser, approximately over 50% of senior executives in the C-suite may be more prone to getting a chronic disease.

Some of his top health tips for C-suite leaders at Tuesday evening’s Tech Council Summit involved energy management, setting positive rituals and strength training.

“Performance doesn’t come down to how much time I have,” Jordan said. “It comes down to the energy you have in the time that you've got available. If you are exhausted, you can't perform at your best—whether that's at work or at home with your children. Energy is the key, and when we start focusing on energy, that intrinsically means we're managing our health.”

Whereas many people might exercise by habit, Jordan contrasts that thinking with creating “positive rituals.” Those are intentional efforts to change behaviors—driven by a purpose like improving work performance, or being a better parent.

Strength training is an important component to any exercise program, Jordan told Tech Council Summit attendees. “You may not feel like you need it now, but when you're 70, 80, 90,” he said, “and you can't get off the toilet seat, or you can't get out the bath, or you can't get out the chair, that's when you'll be wishing, 'I wish I'd done that strength training that I was talking about a couple of decades ago.'”

— Belle LIn

Expect more coverage from the WSJ Technology Council Summit in tomorrow's Morning Download. 

Big Tech wants to dodge H-1B fees. Some of the biggest users of the H-1B program are making plans to avoid paying the Trump administration’s new $100,000 visa fee, the WSJ reports. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are leaning on familiar workarounds including hiring existing H-1B holders, students, and workers on other visas to avoid the charge.

One common program is the Optional Practical Training, or OPT, program.

Smaller companies don’t have that flexibility and may be forced to absorb the cost or lose talent, the Journal reports.

And some experts said the administration’s desire to restrict hiring of skilled foreign workers is a continuing concern for companies.

“By the time the story ends, we’re going to see fewer and fewer highly skilled individuals eligible to work in the United States,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a research organization that supports the program.

AI jitters spread. AI fears deepened Tuesday, with UBS cutting its tech outlook and wealth-management stocks slumping on fresh automation worries.

First, the Chief Investment Office at UBS downgraded the U.S. IT sector on Tuesday to Neutral from Attractive, Barron’s reports. Behind the move: The gobs of money invested in AI; the absence  of major returns from those investments and fear that AI is eating software (see last week). “We believe uncertainty about the outlook could linger for some time,” UBS wrote.

Those worries spread from tech to finance Tuesday, hitting wealth-management stocks after fintech firm Altruist announced an AI tool that can automatically interpret financial documents to craft tax strategies. WSJ reports that investors drove Charles Schwab down 7.4%, its worst percentage decrease since March 2020. Other financial-services providers were also down.

Over $400 million. The annualised revenue run rate of French AI company Mistral, CEO Arthur Mensch tells the FT, up from $20 million a year ago.

100,000. How many AI inference chips China's ByteDance aims to produce by mid-March, Reuters reports.

80-90%. How much memory prices have soared since late last year, according to market researcher Counterpoint’s data, driven by a sharp price increase in dynamic random access memory.

32. The number of crashes Ford has reported to U.S. regulators since 2021 in which the company’s automated driving technology was suspected to be engaged at the time of the collision. Three crashes were fatal.

Exits at xAI. Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu this week became the fifth and sixth xAI cofounders out of a group of 12 to leave Elon Musk's AI company. Ba led research, safety and enterprise, FT reports while Wu was in charge of reasoning, the Information reports. Their departures come days after xAI and SpaceX signed a merger agreement, upping tension among its technical team over demands to improve its models, FT reports.

Over at Tesla, veteran Raj Jegannathan has left the company just a few months after the longtime IT executive was promoted to oversee sales and service for the company, WSJ reports. 

Clever accounting. FT reports that KPMG was able to negotiate lower fees from its accountant Grant Thornton UK, by asking it to pass on the savings from the rollout of AI.

OpenAI fires 'Adult Mode' critic. The AI startup fired senior safety executive Ryan Beiermeister on the grounds of sexual discrimination, after she opposed the company’s planned rollout of a feature allowing users to generate AI erotica in ChatGPT. Beiermeister, who led OpenAI’s product-policy team, warned colleagues the adult mode could harm users and that safeguards against child-exploitation content were inadequate, WSJ reports. OpenAI told her the dismissal stemmed from alleged sexual discrimination against a male colleague, a claim she called “false.”

EU gives green light to Wiz deal. The EU has approved Google’s $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity startup Wiz, the WSJ reports. Announced in March 2025, the deal aims to bolster Google Cloud by accelerating security upgrades and improving multicloud capabilities—key priorities as AI adoption increases.

Activist investor Ancora Holdings has built a roughly $200 million stake in Warner Bros. Discovery and is planning to oppose Warner’s deal to sell its movie and television studios and HBO Max streaming service to Netflix. (WSJ)

A grand jury refused to sign off on criminal charges for several Democratic lawmakers who in a November video told military servicemembers they could refuse to obey illegal orders, people familiar with the matter said. (WSJ)

The Federal Aviation Administration said it was halting all flights to and from El Paso, Texas, for 10 days for “special security reasons,” without elaborating. (WSJ)

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012 with his wife and children, years after Lutnick said he had cut off ties with the convicted sex offender. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.