What's up: The rush to return to the office is stalling; The Trump administration introduced a $100,000 H-1B visa fee, cue the confusion; Seattle is seeing fewer tech jobs.

Good morning. Citi is launching a new AI agent pilot this month, but we can already glean a few insights from the effort. The starting point for this pilot strikes me as more evolved than the pilots that began in the last few years.

We expect agents, with varying degrees of autonomy, to complete complicated assignments much in the way human workers would, “chaining together a series of discrete tasks, sometimes over hours or days, and accessing multiple internal company systems,” the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette writes in today’s story, which you can read here.

Putting “the agent” in agent. Starting this month, Citi will pilot “agentic” capabilities inside the proprietary AI platform it has been developing over the last two years, and users will be able to direct an AI tool to complete multiple tasks, accessing multiple company systems with a single prompt, Citi CTO David Griffiths told her.

A tool inside the platform, Citi Stylus Workspaces, can be used to research a client, build a profile of them from publicly available data and multiple internal data sets, and translate it into a foreign language, in a single step. That was possible before, but it would have required separate direction from the human at each point in the process.

The models are better. “A couple of years ago, you could do agentic things with the early versions of the models that were available then. But they weren’t always very reliable. They weren’t always very good at invoking tools. But they are now,” Griffiths said. The new tool uses a range of models, including Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.  The cost of model usage is coming down quickly, according to Griffiths.

It’s undertaking this trial with 5,000 users, and the project is expected to run four to six weeks. The scale and pace suggest to me that even large companies are figuring out how to move quickly and scale. That’s critical, given how quickly AI is evolving.

How are the AI pilots at your company coming along? Use the links at the end of this email and let us know.

H-1B confusion over new $100,000 fee sent tech firms scrambling

The Trump administration announced a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas, the main pathway to the U.S. for highly skilled foreign workers and a major source of tech talent. Currently, applicants for the H-1B visa must pay a small fee to enter into a lottery system, with winners then paying a larger fee

The news, rolled out over the weekend, caught many H-1B reliant firms off guard. Fearing that they would have to pay the fee for existing H-1B holders trying to return to the country, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others warned H-1B holders not to leave the U.S. and urged employees overseas on the visa to return on Saturday.

The White House on Saturday clarified the issue, saying that the changes only apply to new visas, not renewals, current visa holders or 2025 lottery winners.

Harming or hurting? The Trump administration says the new $100,000 fee will help American workers. The tech industry has shed thousands of employees in recent years, and H-1B critics say it has benefited foreign workers at the expense of domestic tech workers.

Defenders of the visa point to research showing how influxes of foreign-born workers actually boosted wages for native-born workers. Separate research has found that when H-1B immigration is restricted, U.S. multinationals tend to shift work to other countries.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the great return to the office migration is fizzling out.

The rush to return to the office is stalling

Microsoft earlier this month told employees they would be required to spend three days a week in the office, one of the latest moves by a company to hustle workers back to the water cooler. Previously, Microsoft employees were able to work remotely up to 50% of the time, or more with manager approval.

Even as corporate bosses like Microsoft cut back on remote work and ratchet up in-office mandates, average office attendance has barely budged across U.S. workplaces, the Journal reports. 

According to plan? In-office mandates prompt some people to quit, and many suspect that is by design. Tighter requirements sometimes precede or follow layoff announcements, including at Amazon, AT&T and Dell, said Brian Elliott, a former Google and Slack executive who runs Work Forward, tells the Journal's Theo Francis.

That may not be good news for Microsoft's neighbor Seattle, which is already feeling the impact of tech layoffs. 

Seattle grapples with a future of fewer tech jobs

Grunge could soon make a comeback, its hometown Seattle reeling from layoffs at two Big Tech employers in the region: Amazon and Microsoft. 

Between them, the two companies have laid off more than 46,000 employees since 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks workforce reductions. That represents 85% of layoffs by Seattle-area tech companies.

Ripple effects are being felt across commercial real-estate and home prices and retail and restaurant spending is down in popular areas, the WSJ reports.

Introducing a new podcast

Hosted by Alan Murray, president of the WSJ Leadership Institute, WSJ Leadership Institute Presents: Leaders is a new podcast series bringing you revealing conversations with top executives shaping business today. 

America's algorithm. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News’s “Saturday in America” that the board controlling the app in the U.S. would have seven seats, with six held by Americans. She said Oracle will oversee data and privacy, and “the algorithm will also be controlled by America as well.”

Rupert Murdoch is a named defendant in a defamation lawsuit that Trump filed this summer against Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones and parent company News Corp. The Journal published an article in July about a letter bearing Trump’s signature that was included in a 2003 birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein.

AdTech goes to court. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Monday will begin hearing testimony from Google employees, as well as advertisers, publishers and others, as she considers potential penalties against the company for maintaining an illegal monopoly in parts of the online advertising industry. The judge ruled earlier this year that Google’s monopoly in ad exchanges and server markets violated antitrust laws, harming advertisers and consumers.

Dozens of flights were cancelled after cyberattacks Friday targeted the check-in and boarding systems at London’s Heathrow airport, Berlin Brandenburg Airport, Brussels Airport and Dublin Airport.

The software was provided by Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of the U.S. aerospace and defense manufacturer RTX, which on Monday said it was working with the affected airports on the final stages of restoring its systems back to full functionality.

Leading real-estate brokerage Compass said it has agreed to acquire rival Anywhere Real Estate for $1.6 billion, the clearest sign yet that a long stretch of lackluster home sales is sparking industry consolidation. (WSJ)

T-Mobile US named Srini Gopalan, its chief operating officer and a veteran of parent company Deutsche Telekom DTE, as its next chief executive officer. (WSJ)

Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday stretched five hours, reflecting how President Trump, top members of his administration and many other Republican leaders appeared hopeful it might unify and fortify a conservative movement that had shown signs of cracking. (WSJ)

President Trump all but ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political foes, in a series of weekend posts that questioned the lack of action and named one of his former personal attorneys as a new prosecutor to helm some of the investigations. (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.