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For all the talk from employers who claim to understand the needs of working parents, childcare benefits remain elusive in many workplaces. Surveys have repeatedly shown that employees strongly value these benefits, which can run the gamut from childcare subsidies to backup care options. As working parents have demanded more from their employers, these perks have grown in popularity in certain workplaces, alongside more generous parental leave policies. But the companies that offer childcare benefits are still in the minority. The latest edition of an annual study from national childcare provider KinderCare compiled in partnership with the Harris Poll finds that one in three employers do not offer any kind of childcare benefits. And yet, the vast majority of parents surveyed85%said childcare benefits were essential, on par with health insurance and retirement benefits. Childcare ranks as a top-three benefit Of the more than 2,500 respondents, 70% expressed that health insurance was the most crucial workplace benefit, while 56% cited paid time off. But childcare ranked just after healthcare and PTOmaking it one of the top three benefits that was most important to working parents. For a quarter of low-income parents, childcare was actually the leading benefit. Even when companies do offer childcare benefits, however, many working parents find that there is little clarity around what that means for them. Over half of the people surveyed said it was difficult to understand my current childcare benefits, while 71% claimed their employer rarely highlights support for working parents. In fact, 69% said it was a red flag if a company did not broach the subject of support for parents during a job interview. Less support equals more pressure These findings underscore the bind many working parents find themselves in, as they struggle to juggle their caregiving responsibilities and cover the sky-high cost of childcare. A growing number of parents now expect their employers to help them bridge the gap, in no small part because raising children can take a toll on their careers and require a job with more flexibility. KinderCare found that over 60% of people surveyed would reduce their hours or take on a less demanding jobor had already done sodue to their childcare needs. That was even more common among low-income parents, with 80% of them saying they had switched jobs or would consider doing so because of childcare issues. Younger parents who identified as Gen Z were also more likely to make career changes to accommodate having children. Two-thirds of parents say that unreliable childcare has had an impact on their productivity at work, while about three in four parents say that even jobs with more flexibility still put implicit pressure on them to be always available. Women bearing the bruntagain The lack of adequate support is impacting plenty of working parents, as this study makes evident: Over half of the parents surveyed by KinderCare claim to be searching for new jobs that promise better childcare benefits, and 60% worry they will have to dial back work commitments to accommodate their parenting duties. But it is women who often bear the brunt of caregiving responsibilitiesand, in turn, tend to get penalized in the workplace for those obligations. During the pandemic, many women were forced to step away from work when their childcare arrangements fell through and schools went remote, which left them struggling to continue working while watching their children. After years of a strong recovery, working mothers seem to be facing hurdles yet again, as childcare costs continue to climb and perks like remote work have slipped away; the Trump administration has also repeatedly targeted childcare funding for low-income families. In 2025, about 212,000 women exited the workforce between January and June; according to a Washington Post analysis, the number of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 dropped by nearly three percentage points. The December jobs report showed that 81,000 workers left the labor forceand an analysis by the National Womens Law Center revealed that all of those workers were women. Theres a lot at stake for companies that fail to invest in childcare benefits or support workers who are parents, between employee turnover and declining productivity. In the KinderCare study, nearly 80% of people surveyed said they would be more loyal to their employer if they felt more supported as parents. As working parents increasingly look to their employers to help navigate childcare challenges, companies have an opportunityand perhaps a responsibility, too, to try and retain some of their best workers.
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From afar, Legos new set inspired by Claude Monets painting Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies looks like a slightly more vivid version of the original. Step a bit closer, though, and youll find that its intricate brushstrokes are composed of Lego bananas, katana swords, and carrot tops. The new 3,179-piece set was created in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Monets original 1899 artwork, inspired by his idyllic garden in Giverny, is on display. Legos designers spent more than a year working in tandem with the museums curators to faithfully re-create the original paintings iconic Impressionist scene. The set will be available to the public starting on March 4 for $249.99. Over the past few years, as Lego has begun to invest heavily in its sets and products targeted at an adult audience, its designers have had to develop new construction techniques to re-create a wide range of historical artworks. These include sets based on Vincent van Goghs Starry Night and Sunflowers, which use chunky Lego bricks to represent thick layers of paint; a set based on Art Hokusais The Great Wave, which achieves a 3D effect though cleverly layered bricks; and a re-creation of Keith Harings dancing figures, which relies on clear Lego pieces to imitate Harings line work. The new Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies may be their most technically challenging effort yet. [Photo: Lego] How Lego’s designers cleverly mimicked Monet’s style From the beginning, Legos collaboration with The Met was a hands-on process. This piece was chosen through close dialogue between The LEGO Group and The Met, says Stijn Oom, a Lego designer. Together, we identified a fanfavorite artwork that would translate well into an immersive build. Throughout the process, we worked with curators, reviewed color references, and explored how to mirror the paintings layered techniques with LEGO elements. The aim was to let the build itself echo the feeling of creating the original artwork, while giving fans new entry points into Monets world. [Photo: Lego] The process started with Legos design team visiting The Met to see Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies in person. There, they got an up-close look at Monets image of the Japanese-style bridge arching over his backyard pond, rendered in soft hues and small, densely packed brushstrokes. As Ooms team began work on the Lego version, Met staffers also made trips to Legos headquarters in Denmark to review their drafts. In an interview with Artnet, Alison Hokanson, a European paintings curator at The Met, explained that the painting represented a major undertaking for Legos team because of its intricate Impressionist technique, which is difficult to replicate with small Lego pieces. [Photo: Lego] Oom describes the process as both thrilling and challenging. Because Legos color palette was more limited than what Monet could mix on his canvas, Ooms team opted for a brighter palette and blended tones to strike the right color balance. Another key obstacle was accurately recreating the paintings sense of scale and depth. To create the optical illusion of forced perspective, Legos designers carefully layered smaller, darker elements behind the bridge, while positioning larger, brighter elements in front. [Photo: Lego] While experimenting with ways to mimic Monets depictions of light and movement, Ooms team stumbled across several clever uses for some unexpected Lego bricks. The works waterlily pads, for example, are made from a combination of tiles, painters palettes, brushes, and shields, all layered and overlapped to echo the varied thickness and direction of the real paint strokes. The willow tree in the works top left corner uses bars and carrot tops to mimic long, cascading green strokes. And in the vegetation under the bridge, horns, bananas, and katana swords are all carefully placed o guide the eye across the scene. There are plenty of delightful wait, is that . . .? moments built into the model, as we used a diverse array of LEGO elements including many pieces chosen to reflect Monets love of the natural world, Oom says, adding, Those unexpected parts are what make the build so enjoyable. Youre not just recreating a masterpieceyoure discovering it piece by piece.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. The AI arms race may be more of an arm-twist The big AI companies tell us that AI will soon remake every aspect of business in every industry. Many of us are left wondering when that will actually happen in the real world, when the so-called AI takeoff will arrive. But because there are so many variables, so many different kinds of organizations, jobs, and workers, theres no satisfying answer. In the absence of hard evidence, we rely on anecdotes: success stories from founders, influencers, and early adopters posting on X or TikTok. Economists and investors are just as eager to answer the when question. They want to know how quickly AIs effects will materialize, and how much cost savings and productivity growth it will generate. Policymakers are focused on the risks: How many jobs will be lost, and which ones? What will the downstream effects be on the social safety net? Business schools and consulting firms have turned to research to find those answers the question. One of the most consequential recent efforts was a 2025 MIT study, which found that despite spending between $30 billion and $40 billion on generative AI, 95% of large companies had seen no measurable P&L [profit and loss] impact. More recent research paints a somewhat rosier picture. A recent study from the Wharton School found that three out of four enterprise leaders “reported positive returns on AI investments, and 88% plan to increase spending in the next year.” My sense is that the timing of AI takeoff is hard to grasp because adoption is so uneven and depends a lot on the application of the AI. Software developers, for example, are seeing clear efficiency gains from AI coding agents, and retailers are benefiting from smarter customer-service chatbots that can resolve more issues automatically. It also depends on the culture of the organization. Companies with clear strategies, good data, some PhDs, and internal AI enthusiasts are making real progress. I suspect that many older, less tech-oriented, companies remain stuck in pilot mode, struggling to prove ROI. Other studies have shown that in the initial phases of deployment, human workers must invest a lot of time correcting or training AI tools, which severely limits net productivity gains. Others show that in AI-forward organizations, workers do see substantial productivity improvements, but because of that, they become more ambitious and end up working more, not less. The MIT researchers included an interesting disclaimer on their research results. Their sobering findings, they noted, did not reflect the limitations of the AI tools themselves, but rather the fact that organizations often need years to adapt their people and processes to the new technology. So while AI companies constantly hype the ever-growing intelligence of their models, what ultimately matters is how quickly large organizations can integrate those tools into everyday work. The AI revolution is, in this sense, more of an arm-twist than an arms race. The road to ROI runs through people and culture. And that human bottleneck may ultimately determine when the AI industry, and its backers, begin to see returns on their enormous investments. New benchmark finds that AI fails to do most digital gig work AI companies keep releasing smarter models at a rapid pace. But the industrys primary way of proving that progressbenchmarksdoesnt fully capture how well AI agents perform on real-world projects. A relatively new benchmark called the Remote Labor Index (RLI) tries to close that gap by testing AI agents on projects similar to those given to remote contractors. These include tasks in game development, product design, and video animation. Some of the assignments, based on actual contract jobs, would take human workers more than 100 hours to complete and cost over $10,000 in labor. Right now, some of the industrys best models dont perform very well on the RLI. In tests conducted late last year, AI agents powered by models from the top AI developers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others could complete barely any of the projects. The top-performing agent, powered by Anthropics Opus 4.5 model, completed just 3.5% of the jobs. (Anthropic has since released Opus 4.6, but it hasnt yet been evaluated on the RLI.) The test puts the question of the current applicability of agents in a different light, and may temper some of the most bullish claims about agent effectiveness coming from the AI industry. Silicon Valleys pesky principals re-emerge, irking the White House and Pentagon The Pentagon and the White House are big mad at the safety-conscious AI company Anthropic. Why? Because Anthropic doesnt want its AI being used for the targeting of humans by autonomous drones, or for mass surveilling U.S. citizens. Anthropic now has a $200 million contract allowing the use of its Claude chatbot and models by federal agency workers. It was among the first companies to get approval to work with sensitive government data, and the first AI company to build a specialized model for intelligence work. But the company has long had clear rules in its user guidelines that its models arent to be used for harm. The Pentagon believes that after paying for the technology it should be able to use it for any legal application. But acceptable use for AI is different from that for traditional software. AIs potential for autonomy makes it more dangerous by nature, and its risks increase the closer to the battle it gets used. The disagreement, if not resolved, could potentially jeopardize Anthropic’s contract with the government. But it could get worse. Over the weekend, the Pentagon said it was considering classifying Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which would mean the government views Anthropic as roughly as trustworthy as Huawei. Government contractors of all kinds would be pushed to stop using Anthropic. Anthropics limits n certain defense-related uses are laid out in its Constitution, a document that describes the values and behaviors it intends its models to follow. Claude, it says, should be a genuinely good, wise, and virtuous agent. We want Claude to do what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do in Claudes position. To critics in the Trump administration, that language translates to a mandate for wokeness. The whole dust-up harkens back to 2018, when Google dropped its Project Maven contract with the government after employees revolted against Google technology being used for targeting humans in battle. Google still works with the government, and has softened its ethical guidelines over the years. The truth is, tech companies dont stand on principle like they used to. Many have settled into a kind of patronage relationship with the current regime, a relatively inexpensive way to avoid MAGA backlash while keeping shareholders satisfied. Anthropic, in its way, seems to be taking a different course, and it may suffer financially for it. But, in the longer term, the company could earn some respect, trust, and goodwill from many consumers and regulators. For a company whose product is as powerful and potentially dangerous as consumer AI, that could count for a lot. More AI coverage from Fast Company: OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity near approval to host AI directly for the U.S. government New AI models are losing their edge almost immediately Meta patents AI that lets dead people post from the great beyond These 6 quotes from OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger hint at the future of personal computing Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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