Working from home has been more common in major metro areas than in smaller cities and towns since the pandemic started. But that trend has been declining since early 2023, finds the latest installment of WFH Research published in the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

In August, workers in the 10 biggest cities spent about 36% of their paid full days working from home, compared to just over 30% of worked from home days among workers in mid-sized cities and nearly 27% in smaller cities in towns. In January, those percentages shrunk to 33%, 30%, and 26%, respectively. 

The research comes on the heels of the latest data from Kastle Systems, which tracks foot traffic to offices in the 10 major U.S. metro areas. It revealed that office occupancy exceeded 50% in the week ending on January 25 for the first time since the pandemic began.

The big-city phenomenon, as the WFH researchers call it, occurs because jobs in big citiesmost often, desk jobsare disproportionately remote. Plus, bigger cities have way more traffic, so you save a lot more time when you work from home, Jose Maria Barrero, one of the studys authors, tells Fortune.

But after years of wavering attempts to get workers back to the office, the start of 2023 saw yet another strong return-to-office push from some of the countrys largest corporations, including Starbucks, Vanguard Group, and Disney, who mandated employees come in three to four days per week. 

Its working. The number of days U.S. workers across all cities and towns worked from home in January stood at 27.2%down from its peak of 61.5% in May 2020, the first month WFH Research collected data. Work from home levels are softening, Barrero says. Thats interesting because [its been] very stable for at least the previous six monthsthe full second half of 2022.

Regardless, WFH Research said the pandemic permanently solidified remote work as a fact of business at a rapid clip. In just three years, the prevalence of remote work soared by the pre-pandemic equivalent of 40 years. But its important to note that, despite Kastles 50% in-office benchmark, many companies who employ desk workers are currently operating a hybrid work arrangement. 

Bosses should get real about the best-case scenario

Despite desk workers hesitance to exchange their couches for a commute, return-to-office evangelists have their sights set higher. Mark Ein, Kastles chairman, told Fortune in December that he expects office occupancy to level off in 2023 somewhere around 60%. 

Thats far from the 100% in-office landscape Morgan Stanleys James Gorman and Goldman Sachs David Solomon are after, especially because airlines, hotels, and concert venues have all seen a complete rebound to pre-pandemic business levels. But so long as offices remain designed for a way of work that no longer existsand the commute costs an arm and a leg60% may not seem so bad.  

Barrero, on the other hand, is unsure that even 60% is plausible. 

I do think there will be a ceiling for workplace attendance, because I think the sorts of firms that work in buildings with Kastle systems are going to embrace at least some form of hybrid work, he says. I dont expect everyone to be in [the office] most of the time, and the banner moment to return has probably already passed. I wouldve thought last fall or last spring, some time like that. 

In other words, dont expect many more bombshell statistics about in-office attendance this year. Any companies who have wanted to make big movessuch as mandating a full return to office, or even just demarcating certain weekdays as flexiblehave probably already done so, Barrero says.

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The former co-CEO of Salesforce, once tipped to replace co-founder Marc Benioff as head of the cloud software giant, instead is going into business for himself. Taylor has announced that he and a partner will launch a company to employ artificial intelligence, the latest craze sweeping Silicon Valley, to solve some of the most important problems facing business. 

Rarely do you encounter a new technology so powerful that it feels inevitable that it will change the course of every industry, he said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday. I have that same sense of excitement and inevitability about modern AI, especially given recent advances in large language models. 

Ever since OpenAIs ChatGPT bot became the fastest growing consumer app in history since launching late November, society has been grappling with the vast implications of intuitive machine intelligence at the touch of a button. 

No emerging tech trend has grabbed more headlines as seemingly every knowledge-based profession could be on the chopping block, with OpenAIs smash hit product passing certification exams ranging from business to medicine and law. 

Cathie Woods research team at ARK Invest believes deep neural nets like ChatGPT capable of mimicking human learning at exponential speeds sit at the nexus of all major technological trends by revolutionizing productivity.

OpenAIs advanced chatbot stole so much thunder from Google that CEO Sundar Pichai rushed out his rival, dubbed Bard, in order to avoid appearing its A.I. activities had fallen too far behind. 

Instead, the Google CEO suffered an embarrassing failure right off the bat that wiped $100 billion in market cap off the stock, when a promotional video showed Bard answering a query incorrectly. 

The Salesforce exec is enlisting help from a Google veteran

Taylor, whose recent departure from Salesforce shocked the industry, now wants in at the A.I. ground floorand hes recruiting an old friend from his early days at Google to help. 

After 18 years at the tech giant, most recently as vice president of its start-up incubator Labs, Clay Bavor said he was leaving Google to join Taylor because they shared an obsession with recent advances in A.I.

Bret and I have known each other since our early days at Google, and I have always admired his keen product sense and entrepreneurial spirit, his technical chops and, above all, his character and integrity, Bavor wrote on Wednesday.

It wouldnt be the first company Taylor has founded, nor even his second. In 2007 he jumped on the social media bandwagon creating FriendFeed, before selling it in August 2009 to Facebook for a reported $50 million. (It was later shut down.) 

After serving as chief technology officer for Mark Zuckerbergs company, Taylor left in 2012 to found a collaborative business software provider called Quip. Just five years later, Taylor convinced Salesforce to buy it off him for $750 million and he joined Benioff at the company, where Taylor rose to become co-CEO.

The Stanford grad plays to win if need be and doesnt shy away from picking fights with powerful rivals, as evidenced by his brief stint chairing the board of Twitter. 

Taylor took on the-then worlds richest man, Elon Musk, successfully forcing him in October to purchase the social media company for the eye-watering price of $44 billion just as technology firm valuations were plunging. 

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