Good morning. OpenAI threw more resources into the battle for the enterprise this morning, launching a platform called Frontier that helps companies build, deploy and oversee AI agents.

In a call with reporters, OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo described agents as “AI co-workers” that can collaborate with humans and be used alongside agents developed by OpenAI competitors like Anthropic and Microsoft. Read the full story from the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Belle Lin here.

After several years of talk and trials, agents are moving into the marketplace with stunning speed and impact. Software and data stocks took a massive hit over the last two days, wiping out over $300 billion on Tuesday afternoon. The response was largely because of investor fears that AI-driven disruption will extract value from other sectors of the economy.

Companies can adapt to AI, but only if they understand the direction of technological change and its impact on business and operating models, customer and user experience, organizational roles and leadership.

That’s a particular challenge because technology doesn’t always evolve in a linear fashion. Change can accelerate suddenly and with little warning, as agents have during the last few months.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic released new products earlier this week that helped spark the software rout. Anthropic recently expanded the capabilities of its Cowork assistant, powered by Claude, with new plug-ins that perform specialized business functions, including one for the legal sector. OpenAI on Monday released a new version of its coding tool Codex that operates in a way similar to the apps that Anthropic is building into Claude.

Here to help. OpenAI’s Simo said the release of Frontier is “excellent news for the software sector” because it isn’t meant to replace existing software tools. Instead, Frontier will serve as a way for companies to distribute their own AI agents.

“We’re not going to build every single AI agent that companies need,” Simo said. “That’s why we have built the platform in a way where all these software companies can deploy their agents on top of us.”

Enterprise integration. For the OpenAI agents to work in certain cases, they will need to pull in customer data from customer-relationship-management systems like Salesforce, and content from messaging apps like Slack, Simo said.

OpenAI has also struck deals with companies like ServiceNow to directly integrate its AI models into the business software maker’s AI agents.

The company said some of Frontier’s initial customers include Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher and Uber. Dozens of other OpenAI clients are testing the product.

A bold prediction about adoption. “By the end of the year, most digital work in leading enterprises will be directed by people and executed by fleets of agents. This is already true for coding, and it’s going to happen for many other areas, too,” Simo said.

Where does the adoption of AI agents stand in your company? Let us know.

Hey big AI spenders. Overwhelming capital deployment in the name of AI appears to be working for Meta Platforms, which last week reported record sales in the fourth quarter, paralleling a massive spend on AI talent and infrastructure. Google parent Alphabet Wednesday added to the story, reporting fourth-quarter revenue up 18% to nearly $114 billion, with net income rising 30%, WSJ reports.

The company's investments in AI and infrastructure paved the way. Google Cloud posted nearly $18 billion in quarterly revenue—up 48% from a year earlier—and a record $5.3 billion in operating profit, beating Wall Street estimates by 45%.

Google strengthened its AI lead with the launch of Gemini 3 in November; the app now has 750 million monthly users, up from 650 million in October. 

Let the spending continue. The company lifted estimates for capital expenditures this year to $175 billion to $185 billion, up from $91 billion to $93 billion in 2025.

New funding ups the AI-chip stakes. Fresh off a multiyear deal with OpenAI to power its chatbot, AI chip provider Cerebras Systems raised about $1 billion at a $23 billion, Bloomberg reports. The startup is part of a growing cohort, including Amazon and Google, taking aim at Nvidia's dominance in AI chips. Startups focused on inference, the process of running trained AI models to generate responses, are in especially high demand. Nvidia itself signed a $20 billion licensing agreement with Groq last year to access the startup’s inference-optimized chips.

Pre-gaming Super Bowl Sunday. Anthropic’s two Super Bowl ads appear to be a jab at OpenAI’s recent announcement that it would bring ads to ChatGPT, WSJ reports. In one, a young man struggling through pull-ups asks a muscular bystander how to get six-pack abs. The man begins with a robotic, chatbot-like answer—then abruptly pivots into an ad for “StepBoost Max” insoles.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was amused, admitting in a post on X the ads “are funny" and "I laughed.” But they are also “dishonest,” he said, and Anthropic itself is a company that “serves an expensive product to rich people.” Who's ready for some football?

$333.6 million. How much tech companies—including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity—spent on broadcast TV ads for their AI offerings in the U.S.

$185 billion. The top range for Google's forecast for capital expenditures in 2026, double 2025's total.

More than 1.6 million. The number of  AI agents that have joined MoltBook, a free-wheeling forum for bots that some say is proof of artificial general intelligence.

Move over burnout, fear of AI is now the top concern. This week's stock selloff underscores growing fears of AI-driven disruption... unless you're an AI developer. No surprise, then, that AI adoption has become job seekers’ top concern, overtaking burnout, WSJ reports.

Worst January for jobs since the Great Recession. U.S. employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, up 118% from a year earlier and the highest January total since 2009, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The consulting firm said most cuts were planned late last year, suggesting employers are pessimistic about the 2026 outlook. ]

Contract losses, economic conditions and restructuring were the top drivers of layoffs last month, the report said. AI was cited for 7% of total cuts for the month. “It’s difficult to say how big an impact AI is having on layoffs specifically. We know leaders are talking about AI, many companies want to implement it in operations, and the market appears to be rewarding companies that mention it,” said Challenger.

Tech layoffs keep spreading. Workday is cutting about 400 employees to redirect investment to other areas, Bloomberg reports. Investors view the company as among the enterprise-software players most exposed to AI upstarts. The stock is down 34% over the past year. Meanwhile, Pinterest said it fired two engineers who built an internal app to track company layoffs, using improperly accessed confidential data, CNBC reports. Pinterest last week said it would cut up to about 15% of its workforce, or roughly 700 jobs.

TSMC boosts Japan’s AI push. TSMC, chipmaker to the stars, will produce more-advanced 3-nanometer chips in Japan, a move that marks a breakthrough for the country, which currently lacks advanced-chip capacity despite major government-backed projects, WSJ reports. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said the upgraded output from TSMC’s Kumamoto site will support data centers, robotics, autonomous vehicles and other strategic sectors. 

Voice AI goes Hollywood. AI voice startup ElevenLabs raised $500 million in Series D funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $11 billion. WSJ reports. The company was hit with a lawsuit from voice actors after its 2022 debut, but it has since struck partnerships with celebrities like Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey.

The Trump administration is planning to make it easier to discipline—and potentially fire—career officials in senior positions across the government, a move that would affect roughly 50,000 federal workers. (WSJ)

Advisers for SpaceX, which recently merged with xAI, have reached out to major index providers, including Nasdaq, to discuss how it might join key indexes sooner than normal. (WSJ)

Brad Karp, the leader of Paul Weiss, one of the country’s biggest law firms, resigned as chair in the wake of new revelations about his association with Jeffrey Epstein. (WSJ)

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Wednesday that it had opened an investigation into whether Nike discriminated against white workers in hiring, layoffs and other decisions in its efforts to diversify its workforce. (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.