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Companies want to hire workers with artificial intelligence skills, but don’t want to pay the premium. Those are the findings from a new report from Payscale, a leading online provider of data on salaries and compensation. Payscale’s 2026 Compensation Best Practices Report finds that while 60% of companies mention AI as part of their job descriptions, only 55% are willing to shell out extra money for those skills in the form of higher salaries, bonuses or even equity in the company. Why? Well, according to the report, there are a few reasons for the discrepancy, including the impact of a tight job market on hiring, coming at a time when businesses are also tightening their budgets. In fact, 51% of the businesses surveyed say their biggest challenge in the current economic landscape is balancing employee pay expectations with budget constraints. It could be that while companies want to pay more, they just don’t have the cash. So, how much are jobs paying? The report finds the median base pay increase in 2026 is only 3.5%. Job hugging trend continues in workplace Another reason for lower-than-desired salaries is “job hugging“the current trend where employees are staying longer in their positions and choosing not to leave their jobs. Only about 8% of U.S. workers are actually voluntarily quitting, the report finds. And those positions take about 30 days to fill, signaling “reduced churn” and less urgency on the part of companies to compete aggressively for talent. According to the report, 40% of the organizations surveyed say they have indeed experienced “job hugging” in 2025, with 15% agreeing that it inhibits business growth. With confidence in finding a new job at an all-time low among workers, and “workers hold[ing] onto their jobs for dear lifeit’s no wonder AI skills aren’t boosting salaries across the board. How AI is transforming the job market While 59% of the human resource leaders and compensation teams that Payscale surveyed say they are not replacing employees with AI now or in the future, 30% already areor are considering it for the future. Construction, business services, technology (including software), and healthcare are the leading industries already replacing workers with AI, according to the report.
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E-Commerce
At a time of broken climate pledges and an economy-wide bearhug of automation and artificial intelligence, the dominant themes of the recently announced 2026 National Design Awardsclimate action, sustainability, dedication to craftare a refreshing reset. Rewarding innovation and impact among U.S.-based designers, the awards are both an honor and a pulse check on the state of design. This year’s group of winners represent a diverse group of practitioners and firms exploring ways that work in design and the arts can counteract environmental catastrophe and re-center the human hand in shaping the future. Honorees include the indigenous underpinnings in the textiles of fashion designer Josh Tafoya, the cross-border ecological and social research outposts of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, and the environmentally sensitive museum design of architecture firm Frida Escobedo Studio. Other winners were selected for works pushing the boundaries of fields from digital cartography to ecological restoration. Josh Tafoya, Ranchero La Bruja [Photo: Courtesy of Josh Tafoya/Cooper Hewitt] Launched in 2000 by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the awards honor designers across design disciplines from architecture to digital design to interior design. Despite the awards program being created as a project of the White House Millennium Council, this year’s honorees zag away from the trendlines of current national politics. Two standout honorees include Mattaforma, a New York City-based architecture and research studio focusing on mass-timber and sustainable building materials, and Berea College Student Craft, a hands-on experiential design and craft program that dates back to 1893. Mattaforma, Parkview Mountain House [Photo: Courtesy of Lauren Kerr/Cooper Hewitt] The 2026 jury was chaired by Aric Chen, director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and also included Liz Danzico, vice president of design at Microsoft AI, Henk Ovink, executive director and founding commissioner for the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Berea College Student Craft, Squibble Broom [Photo: Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt] Here’s the full list of categories and winners: Architecture: Frida Escobedo Studio Climate Action: UCSD Community Stations by Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Communication Design: Thought Matter Design Visionary: Robert Earl Paige Digital Design: Laura Kurgan Emerging Designer: Mattaforma Fashion Design: Josh Tafoya Interior Design: Charlap Hyman & Herrero Landscape Architecture: Ten Eyck Landscape Architects Product Design: Berea College Student Craft
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E-Commerce
Next week, a rare celestial event will take to the skies. On March 3, amateur astronomers will get to witness a blood moon and a worm moon all at once. According to Space.com, a blood moon occurs during a total lunar eclipse, as the Earth passes directly between the Sun and Moon and casts a shadow across the moon’s surface. The moon appears red due to the way the Earth’s atmosphere filters sunlight. “This effect, known as Rayleigh scattering, is the same reason that the sky takes on magnificent shades of red and orange around sunset,” the site explains. While different seasons often bring exciting astrological events, this one is exceptionally rare. According to NASA, a blood moon can only occur during the full moon phase. But the blood moon also coincides with March’s full worm moon, named for the time of year when the Earth begins to thaw (which the worms appreciate). When can I see the blood moon? The eclipse, which will be visible across most of the U.S., is set to begin at 3:33 a.m. EST on March 3. The eclipse won’t begin to enter totality until around 6:04 a.m. EST, reaching its “greatest point at 6:33 a.m. ET, just minutes before the Full Moon peak,” explains Almanac.com. Do I need to wear protective glasses? Luckily, you won’t need any special equipment to view the event. It’s safe to look directly at a lunar eclipse (unlike a solar eclipse, which you need to wear protective eyewear to safely view, minus during complete totality). Still, NASA says that, if you want an even better view, binoculars are a good idea. “For a more dramatic observing experience, seek a dark environment away from bright lights. Binoculars or a telescope can also enhance your view,” it explains. What other celestial events are coming up? After the dramatic show next week, the event will not take place again until New Years Eve 20282029. That means, if you’re hoping to catch the show, you better make sure you’re looking up. Especially because constellations may appear brighter, too, as the moon’s light is dimmed. But another exciting astrological event will take place just days later. Space.com says on March 8, a “conjunction” of Venus and Saturn will appear in the sky. While the planets are, in fact, very far apart, as Venus “passes one degree to the upper right of Saturn,” they’ll appear closer than ever from Earth.
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E-Commerce
The growing backlash to data centers, and the rising electricity bills that accompany them, has become difficult for politicians to ignore. President Donald Trump is now the latest to address the issue. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump announced what he called a ratepayer protection pledge, for which the White House will tell major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs. We have an old grid, Trump said. It could never handle the kind of numbers, the amount of electricity thats needed. Under the agreement, tech companies can build their own power plants, which Trump says will protect community electricity prices from going up. In many cases, he added, prices of electricity will go down for the community, and very substantially down. Another empty promise? To climate experts, though, that pledge sounds like another empty promise from the president, just like his campaign vow to reduce Americans utility costs. One of Trumps key campaign promises was to slash Americans energy bills in half within the first year of his presidency. But in reality, electricity bills rose 13% nationally by the end of 2025, according to Climate Power, a climate advocacy organization. That hike hasnt been entirely because of the AI-driven data center boom. Bills rose in part because the Trump administration has canceled clean energy projects like wind and solar and instead made the country more dependent on foreign oil and fossil fuels. Those efforts will only exacerbate the energy costs associated with data centers. Wind and solar power are cheaper than coal and natural gas for utility-scale electricitybut as data centers demand more and more power, the country is building more natural gas power plants. If Trump and Republicans were serious about lowering costs, theyd focus on bringing more made in America clean energy onto the grid, Climate Power senior advisor Jesse Lee said in a statement following the State of the Union. Instead, theyre trying to ban it. Data centers becoming a political issue Trumps ratepayer protection pledge is the latest version of a data center solution that has been growing in popularity. As they face increased backlash, with communities opposing data center projects in their backyards, some tech companies like Anthropic have taken it upon themselves to promise to pay for their increased energy use. Politicians, on both sides of the aisle, are also increasingly calling for fixes. In November 2025, Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor’s race after focusing on rising electricity bills during her campaign. She specifically called out data centers, saying shell make sure they pay their own way and their fair share of their new electricity and transmission needs. More recently, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill this month to stop data centers from driving up energy costs by requiring them to have their own power sources. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders just this week went for a more extreme solution, calling for a moratorium on data center construction. Its not clear if these efforts will do anything to stem the rising costs for all the data centers already planned or in the works, thoughwhich would add a total of 93 GW of electricity demand to the grid by 2029. Already in response to that demand, proposals for new natural gas plants are soaring, tripling in 2025 compared to the year prior, according to nonprofit research organization Global Energy Monitor. The U.S. now has the most gas-fired power capacity in development (that includes projects that have been announced as well as those in preconstruction and/or construction), the nonprofit sayswith more than a third of that capacity slated to directly power data centers.
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E-Commerce
Discord, the popular platform for gamers to communicate online, is postponing its controversial age verification policy after receiving swift backlash from users with concerns about their privacy. The global rollout of the system is now delayed to the second half of 2026, Discord’s Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote in a Tuesday blog post acknowledging that the company missed the mark. Many of you are worried that this is just another big tech company finding new ways to collect your personal data. That were creating a problem to justify invasive solutions, Vishnevskiy wrote. I get that skepticism. Its earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry. But thats not what were doing. Discord, which says it has more than 200 million active users, will continue to meet specific legal obligations it has for age verification of users, the company said, but the global expansion of age verification will only come after it makes changes to the initial policy it laid out in early February. The company announced earlier this month that it would roll out an age verification policy in March that would include face scanning or requests for an ID upload for users it could not determine were adults. This drew swift ire from users. Many pointed to a recent security breach of a third-party provider Discord worked with that exposed government ID photos of up to 70,000 Discord users. Vishnevskiy referenced the security breach in the blog post, writing that he understood that incident added to users’ skepticism, but he emphasized the company no longer works with that vendor and has rigorous standards for its partners. Every vendor we work with goes through a security and privacy review before integration, he wrote. That includes contractual limits on data use, and strict retention and deletion requirements. Information submitted for age verification is stored only for the minimum time necessary, which in most cases means its deleted immediately. If a vendor doesnt pass, we dont work with them. One of the vendors that didn’t meet the mark was Persona, an identity verification service. Vishnevskiy said Discord ran a limited test with Persona in the United Kingdom only in January. The company was not able to meet Discord’s standard for facial age estimation, Vishnevskiy wrote, which stipulates that the estimation must be performed entirely on-device, meaning your biometric data never leaves your phone. The company distanced itself from Persona after that relationship also became the subject of online criticism. Persona is backed by the venture capital firm Founders Fund, which is run by by Palantir Technologies co-founder Peter Thiel. Thiel and Palantir are often criticized for of the company’s partnerships with the government for surveillance purposes, with Palantir recently inking an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to streamline the process of identifying and deporting people the agency is targeting. The backlash to the original policy and even the revised version came even though Vishnevskiy wrote that for “90%+ of users, nothing changes. Discord is able to proactively determine the ages of the vast majority of users by looking at account-level signals. Those include how long the account has existed, whether there is a payment method on file, the types of servers a user is in and general patterns of account activity, Vishnevskiy wrote. He emphasized the company does not read messages, analyze conversations or look at account content to estimate users ages. For the minority of users whose ages Discord cannot determine, the company is now working to offer more options beyond face scanning and requesting an ID, including credit card verification. The company is going to complete and expand alternative options before rolling out the new system. Users who choose not to verify their age will get to keep their account, servers, friends list, direct messages and voice chat, but will not be able to access age-restricted content or change certain default safety settings designed to protect teens, Vishnevskiy wrote. Discord promised users it will publish a detailed post explaining how its automatic age determination systems work and will document every verification vendor and their practices on its website. Kaitlyn Huamani, AP technology writer
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E-Commerce
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