Deloitte is cutting down PTO, parental leave, and other benefits for some US workers

Deloitte introduced a new firmwide talent architecture in January.

Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images

• Deloitte US will cut benefits for some workers, according to internal documents seen by Business Insider.
• Parental leave, PTO, and pension plan payments have been pared back for some internal-facing staff.
• The changes are part of a wider overhaul in which the firm has also created new job titles.

Deloitte plans to pare back several core benefits for some of its employees, according to internal documents and a meeting recording seen by Business Insider.

Parental leave, annual PTO, a pension plan, and IVF funding have been reduced or cut for a group of employees who fall under the "Center" talent model, which broadly refers to employees in internal support roles, such as admin, IT support, and finance.

The changes are slated to come into effect on January 1, 2027, according to a document sent to the Center talent model in March.

It is unclear exactly how many employees will be impacted. The Big Four consulting and accounting firm employs about 181,000 people in the US.

The benefit shake-up is part of a wider talent restructuring that Deloitte announced internally in January, and that was first reported by Business Insider. As part of the changes, the firm told employees they would be getting new job titles and created a new class of leader. It also created four new segments within the business: Center, Core, Project, and Domain.

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"Deloitte US is modernizing its talent architecture to provide a more tailored experience reflective of our professionals' broad range of skills and the work they do serving our clients," a Deloitte spokesperson told Business Insider.

"Benefits are regularly updated and will be tailored for a small subset of professionals to better align with the marketplace," the spokesperson said.

Companies are reducing costs

Deloitte isn't alone in tightening up workplace policies.

Workers face a difficult corporate outlook in 2026, as the shaky job market has shifted power back to employers. Faced with AI disruption and economic uncertainty, many companies are raising performance expectations and reining in perks.

Deloitte's US head count has grown over the past three years, alongside rising revenue, which reached $35.7 billion for the year ending May 31, 2025 — up 8% compared to the previous financial year.

Like its industry peers, however, Deloitte is facing challenges across both its core business lines — accounting and consulting — largely driven by AI disruption. Major consulting firms are evolving their offerings to drive AI-related business, while redesigning their internal operations and workforces to fit the future landscape.

Deloitte's government business was also hit last year amid the Trump administration's DOGE-related crackdown on consulting contracts.

"We are hearing from a number of clients that they are considering actions to reduce cost, given the ongoing uncertainty in the global economy," Ravin Jesuthasan, a future-of-work expert and the global leader of Mercer's transformation services business, told Business Insider.

They're taking a hard look at the different components of their overall labor cost, and "benefits and perks that are not fully utilized by the workforce are typically top of the list," he said.

Most of the cuts he's seen across the market have focused on tightening travel budgets and scaling back "nice to have" perks, Jesuthasan said.

A harder-edged management culture has taken hold in the corporate world, with strict RTO mandates, mass layoffs, and higher performance expectations placed on workers across the business landscape.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The company has restricted work travel and cut perks in recent years.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

In recent years, Google and Meta have tried to cut costs by dropping perks and restricting work travel, and Amazon has reduced the number of shares it gives employees as part of their compensation.

"Companies have been getting tougher across the board," both by way of layoffs and ramping up workloads, said Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton Business School.

"Cuts and squeezing do not seem to be because businesses are in trouble. It seems more like with the job market slack, they feel they can," he added.

What's changing at Deloitte?

From January, all employees in the Center talent model will receive up to eight weeks of paid family leave and 18 to 25 days of PTO, depending on their seniority and tenure, the internal document shows.

They will stop earning additional accruals under Deloitte's pension plan after December 31st, the document said.

The changes also impact the part of Deloitte's Enterprise Solutions team that falls under the Center talent model, documents show.

Paid family leave, including parental leave, will be cut in half from 16 weeks to eight for employees in this group. They will also lose a $50,000 adoption and surrogacy reimbursement, which covers IVF treatment, starting in January.

PTO allowances for this group will decrease by 5-10 days for most employees, depending on seniority and start date. For example, an Enterprise Solutions employee who joined a decade ago will see their PTO drop from 30 days to 20 days in January, the documents show.

PTO for junior-level employees in this group will remain unchanged at either 20 or 18 days, depending on whether they joined before or after 2017.

In addition to PTO, the firm will continue to offer 15 companywide "disconnect days" and holidays, according to the documents.

Employees will retain benefits like medical and dental coverage, well-being subsidy, bereavement leave, and tuition assistance, according to a recording of a February meeting led by Lora Rothe, Deloitte's chief people officer for Enterprise Solutions, seen by Business Insider.

Enterprise Solutions employees will still be eligible for Deloitte's 401(k) savings plan, Rothe said.

One Deloitte worker who has been at the firm for over 10 years and falls into the Center talent model told Business Insider their benefits used to be "amazing" but said the changes felt like a "huge regression."

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I turned my grandmother's recipes into a $1 million catering company that feeds people from Sergey Brin to Steph Curry

Blackberry Soul Fine Catering has catered events for the staff of Google, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Stephen and Ayesha Curry, and the Golden State Warriors.

Blackberry Soul Fine Catering

• Chef Rene Johnson built a million-dollar soul food empire catering to Bay Area power players.
• Using her grandmother's recipes, Blackberry Soul has fed big names like Sergey Brin and Steph Curry.
• Now, Johnson coaches entrepreneurs on how to scale their businesses as she did.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chef Rene Johnson, the founder of Blackberry Soul Fine Catering and entrepreneur behind Link and Thrive, a mentorship program for business owners. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I didn't even like food as a kid.

What I loved was being with my grandmother, who always made everything from scratch, and the way our family gathered around her food. That's where it started for me — not with cooking, but with connection.

I was her first granddaughter, and I always say she channeled me the most. I cook like her, think like her, have a business mindset like her. Everything I make — the peach cobbler, the red beans and rice, the biscuits — all come from her.

Before I rebuilt my career around her food, I was in the mortgage industry.

I had gotten a job in telephone sales and took to it naturally. When my clients closed on a home, I would gift them a homemade dessert: peach cobbler, pound cake, or banana pudding. That was my way of celebrating them.

When the mortgage industry crashed, I had to figure out what to do with my life. That's when I turned to cooking.

Nobody would have thought that I — a teenage mom without a college degree or formal culinary training — would build a business like this.

My kids were the ones who told me, "Mom, do something with your food." I lived in Georgia for a while and started dropping off meals at barber shops and around the neighborhood, but I couldn't quite get my footing there.

When I came back home to the Bay Area, everything changed. That's when I learned that it's not only about what you do, but also about who you do it with. I tapped into my community, and Blackberry Soul took off.

A broader mindset was key to my growth

At first, I thought I was building a small business, but I knew I had to shift that idea in my head.

I started telling people, "This is not a small business. This is my company." That changed everything: how I showed up, how I hired, how I thought about growing.

A wedding was my first big event. After that, I did a fundraiser for a political event with almost no budget, but everyone important was in the room. They tasted my soul food, and I became the preferred caterer for their events.

At first, I did everything myself, but I was holding on too tightly, trying to control everything. One of my biggest lessons, something I should have done sooner, was learning to let go.

When I finally did build a real crew, that's when the business blew up. As I let other people take over tasks like answering phones or doing the shopping, we grew so much faster than I could have ever imagined.

These days, if I show up to help with an event, sometimes my team will say, "You're not on the schedule. You can go home."

That's when you know you've built something real — when the business can run itself.

Now, Blackberry Soul feeds everyone from our community to major political and business leaders.

We've served thousands of people at once. I've fed 2,500 people at Google, including its cofounder Sergey Brin. I've cooked for Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and so many others, but it's important to me that we treat every client the same.

Whether we're catering for executives or people in my community, I want them to have the same experience — that same "pop" when they take the first bite. So we cook everything from scratch and don't cut corners.

From solo operator to mentor

These days, my passion has grown bigger than food. I still love cooking, but helping other entrepreneurs is my real focus.

I learned everything the hard way. Nobody taught me how to run a business, how to scale, or build a team. I didn't even know I needed PR in the early days.

After I started really growing, people began coming up to me all the time asking for mentorship.

That's why I created Link and Thrive, my coaching program to teach people how to build their own businesses. Rather than being in the kitchen, I now spend most of my days paying it forward.

I always say: You might know how to make a great hamburger, but do you know how to run a hamburger stand?

That's what we focus on — the day-to-day reality of being an entrepreneur. Building your team, creating customer experiences, and navigating the peaks and valleys.

My goal is to pass along the lessons I learned and show people that success is not just about the work. It's about how you show up, connect, and grow.

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Inside Iran's weapons arsenal

Kurdish officials displayed the remnants of a Shahed drone (foreground) they recovered from an Iranian attack.

Ibra Naber/Business Insider

• Iran attacked the Kurdish region in northern Iraq over 400 times during its war with the US and Israel.
• Officials displayed weapons recovered from these strikes.
• They included a new drone jet that's twice as fast as the Shahed drones that are Iran's signature.

Three men unloaded the remains of a monstrous weapon from a white van in Erbil, Iraq last week. Here, in the cordoned-off yard of the Asayish — the security forces of the auton›omous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq — explosive ordnance disposal specialists examined every Iranian projectile used in this war. "Zolfaghar," one of the Kurds said, tapping the pitch-black metal. "This missile struck near a mosque on the outskirts of the city just a few hours ago."

The Zolfaghar is a large ballistic missile that carries a warhead weighing up to 1,100 pounds. The missile is only one part of the extensive arsenal with which Iran has attacked the Gulf states and the Middle East in recent weeks. In an exclusive presentation for Business Insider, the Asayish unit displayed some of the drones and missiles that have struck Kurdistan since late February, killing 17 people in the region.

These remnants are a gallery of the many weapons Iran has used to kill and terrify people across the region: triangular Shahed long-range drones, hulking ballistic missiles, and a new jet-powered drone that's more difficult to shoot down.

"With the help of Russia, China and North Korea, Iran has succeeded over recent decades in building up an impressive arsenal of effective, technologically sophisticated long-range weapons," the influential Austrian colonel and military analyst Markus Reisner said.

Authorities in the Kurdish region of Iraq have recovered drones and missiles from the many Iranian attacks there during Iran's war with the US and Israel.

Ibra Naber/Business Insider

Tehran's ability to continue carrying out 60 to 90 drone attacks a day — combined with missile strikes — even into the sixth week of the war prolonged the conflict and increased pressure on global energy markets. The American-Israeli alliance struck more than 13,000 targets in Iran, including more than 2,000 command and control targets, but was unable to decisively break its military capabilities, before the US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on April 7. According to US intelligence assessments reported by CNN, around half of Iran's missile launchers are still intact; in addition, the country continues to possess thousands of long-range kamikaze drones.

The destructive power of Iranian weapons has been demonstrated in this war, Reisner said: "Drones are being deployed in a saturating combination with cruise missiles and rockets. When these weapons systems are combined with targeted satellite reconnaissance from Russia and China, they also develop a troubling degree of precision."

In the yard, Kurdish security forces lined up various pieces of debris. In the center: Iran's most frequently used weapon — Shahed long-range drones, with a range of up to 1,200 miles. Russia uses these lumbering weapons, which have a recognizable delta-wing shape, extensively against Ukraine, usually in improved variants. "We identified three kinds of Iranian Shahed drones," said Halmat, a member of the Kurdish bomb-analysis team. The most frequently used Shahed-136 had more of a lead-colored, metallic surface; others were lighter or black. Their components, however, were very similar.

Officials recovered a new jet-powered drone (at left) designed with sharp angles to reduce its radar signature.

Ibra Naber/Business Insider

Iran also used other models from its roughly dozen combat drones against Kurdistan, including the Meraj-532, a medium-range attack drone used by the Revolutionary Guards. "And that over there," Halmat said, "is a new Iranian drone, the Hadid-110."

It is a jet-powered attack that can race past many air defenses and slam into targets at over twice the speed of most Shaheds. The drone is launched with a rocket booster that accelerates it before the jet engine takes over for sustained flight. Its design similarly reflects the growing sophistication of Iran's designs: A triangular wing configuration combined with sharply angled surfaces intended to hide it from radar. One of these drone jets slammed into a home in a neighborhood outside Erbil, the EOD specialists said.

Smaller combat drones with a shorter range have also appeared in the Iran war. Videos released in March by Iranian-backed militias show small piloted drones hitting hangars and a helicopter near a US base in Iraq. Even advanced air defenses struggled to defeat threats this small and numerous.

The bulky remains of the Kheibar ballistic missile lay at the back of the yard. "They also used it to strike civilian areas here in the region," said Pishtiwan, who is part of the engineering team of the Asayish security forces. He pointed to the markings left on the 10-meter-long missile. "This happened on March 19 in the Mala Omer area, outside the city. We found it at 12:55 p.m."

Kurdish EOD specialists recovered fragments from an Iranian Kheibar ballistic missile that struck the region.

Ibra Naber/Business Insider

In total, Iran attacked the Erbil region alone with more than 400 drones and ballistic missiles, Halmat said: "And we have defused and collected more than 200 bombs."

Pishtiwan explained that after every explosion in the region, one of their specialized units is dispatched to assess the damage and identify the weapon. The risk of being caught in a so-called double-tap attack — a second strike hitting the same target just minutes later — is very real. "But it is our duty to protect our people. We are ready to sacrifice our lives for this country."

According to military expert Reisner, Iran's weapons have also inflicted considerable damage on the United States and Israel. "Iranian strikes in Israel and in the middle of American bases made that abundantly clear in recent weeks."

The past weeks have also delivered a painful lesson in the Kurdistan Region: not even the United States — the most advanced military in the world — can fully protect its bases and diplomatic facilities in a modern drone war.

The Erbil region has been struck over 400 times by Iranian drones and missiles, authorities there said.

Ibra Naber/Business Insider

During the attacks on Erbil, Iran and its allied militias targeted both the US military installation at the airport and the US consulate, which opened in late 2025 at a cost of nearly $800 million. Kurdish security forces shared videos with Business Insider showing damage from impacts on the consulate grounds, though the destruction does not appear to have been extensive. The French military was hit harder. A drone strike killed a French soldier in March in a town near Erbil, which President Emmanuel Macron confirmed was the country's first military death in the Middle East war.

Kurdish security forces said they are almost entirely dependent on Western air defenses. A Patriot system fought off Iranian ballistic missiles over the last few weeks. Drone defenses were numerous. The C-RAM gun system fired bursts, including glowing tracer rounds, at incoming drones. And US fighter jets like the F-16 Fighting Falcon regularly took off to hunt drones, as seen in videos from Kurdistan. According to media reports, the Raytheon Coyote drone was also used to destroy several drones in flight.

Kurdish security officials say that, according to their information, no Ukrainian drone specialists were stationed in Kurdistan for air defense. Kyiv had deployed more than 200 drone experts during the conflict with Iran, primarily to Gulf states, to provide support.

According to Reisner, Iran's waves of attacks are also a final warning for Europe. "The range of Iranian missiles extends to the periphery of Europe. The US missile defense system stationed in Europe — the European Phased Adaptive Approach, or EPAA — and national procurement initiatives such as Germany's introduction of the Israeli 'Arrow' system are therefore of great importance."

Ibrahim Naber is a foreign correspondent who has reported from Ukraine since 2022. In October 2025, he and his team were injured in a Russian Lancet drone strike in Dnipro. In 2025, he received the George Weidenfeld Prize for his coverage of global conflicts and crisis zones. He wrote his dissertation at King's College London on the psychology of modern drone warfare.

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An Anthropic cofounder's advice on what to study in college

Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark joked that Anthropic is making it a great time to be a philsophy major.

Bloomberg/Getty Images

• Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark says his literature degree proved to be a great match for working in AI.
• He said the best majors will involve "synthesis across a whole variety of subjects."
• Clark pointed out that Anthropic employs philosophers.

Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark says you shouldn't write off liberal arts majors.

After all, Clark, a former journalist who studied literature at the University of East Anglia, is one of them.

"What turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future," Clark said on Monday during Semafor's World Economy Summit. "That's turned out to be like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn't have predicted."

Clark said that the best areas of study are those that have a lot of overlap.

"I think that majors which are going to become more important are ones which involve like synthesis across a whole variety of subjects and analytical thinking about that," he said.

The best skill, Clark said, is learning how to ask the right question.

"The really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having intuitions about what would be interesting, colliders, different insights from many different disciplines," he said.

After repeated pressing, Clark said that "rote programming" is something he would avoid. That's on brand with his Anthropic colleagues, including Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, who has said the title of software engineer will start to be phased out this year.

"Some people need to know those fundamentals, but we do see that technology move up the stack," Clark said.

Overall, though, Clark said that majors that may seem mismatched to the age of AI will actually be fairly worthwhile. He pointed out that Anthropic employs philosophers.

"When was the last time you heard that a philosophy degree was like a great job prospect?" he said.

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The ultimate do-nothing side hustle: selling courses

The most 'ethical' AI company might also be the web's biggest freeloader

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

• Cloudflare's data shows that AI companies consume more web value than they return.
• Anthropic's crawl-to-refer ratio is 8,800 to 1, highlighting ethical concerns.
• AI chatbots reduce web traffic, upending the web's grand bargain.

Cloudflare's latest data offers one of the clearest snapshots yet of how AI companies consume the web, and how little they give back.

The company, which powers roughly 20% of the internet, tracks how AI bots crawl websites versus how often those platforms send users back through referrals. The resulting "crawl-to-refer" ratio is a simple yet telling metric: how much value is extracted compared to returned.

The early April 2026 figures are stark. Anthropic is the worst by a wide margin, with a ratio of 8,800 to 1. That means its bots crawl webpages 8,800 times for every referral sent.

OpenAI follows at 993 to 1. Microsoft, Google, and DuckDuckGo look far more balanced by comparison.

Anthropic's position is particularly striking given its reputation for being "ethical." That reputation has made it a preferred choice among some users who want to support more responsible AI development. This data highlights a different dimension of ethics — how companies interact with the broader web ecosystem that provides information for AI model outputs.

Historically, the internet operated on an implicit bargain: websites allowed search engines to crawl and index their content for free, and in return received traffic they could monetize. Generative AI breaks that bargain. Chatbots increasingly provide direct answers, reducing the need for users to click through to original sources.

This results in a system that extracts more value than it gives back — and in some cases, increases costs for site owners due to heavy bot activity.

Anthropic has previously questioned Cloudflare's methodology and pointed to growing referral traffic from new features. Still, the broader trend is hard to ignore. I asked Anthropic for comment this time, too, and it did not respond.

If the web's economic engine depends on traffic and referrals, these ratios raise a fundamental question: What will incentivize the sharing of verified information online in the future?

Cloudflare is trying with a new marketplace for web content. It's unclear if efforts like this will succeed. After all, what's better than using people's content for free?

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How Taco Bell uses its best GMs as a growth engine

Top-performing Taco Bell managers gathered in Hawaii in March for the company's annual staff recognition retreat.

Courtesy of Taco Bell

• Taco Bell recently hosted its Golden Bell awards, a recognition trip for top-performing managers.
• More than a management retreat, Taco Bell says the event helps drive outsize growth.
• Golden Bell-winning restaurants grew sales by nearly 20% in 2025 and boast better staff retention.

At Taco Bell, a weeklong trip to Hawaii is more than a perk for top-performing managers — it's part of the company's growth strategy.

The chain's annual Golden Bell awards, held this year in mid-March, recognize its top 150 general managers and are as much a management retreat as they are an awards show. Taco Bell brings its top GMs to Maui, where they get a week of recognition, excursions, and a chance to compare notes with company leaders and one another.

Like many companies, Taco Bell uses retreats and recognition to reward top-performing managers. However, what sets the taco chain's approach apart is the continued bet that its general managers — not solely its menu or marketing — are a key competitive edge, even as other companies scale back middle management.

In its fourth quarter, Taco Bell delivered 7% same-store sales growth, outpacing the industry, and the company says Golden Bell winners were a big part of that performance. The company said its award-winning restaurant leaders grew sales 19% in 2025, often running high-volume locations with annual sales volumes of $2.5 million to $4 million and beyond.

Michelle Beasley, Taco Bell's US chief operating officer, told Business Insider that the award process is built around a small set of business metrics tied to the brand's goals.

Winners are selected from three categories: highest transaction growth, the company's "Supreme" operational-excellence measure, and guest reviews. Beasley said Taco Bell is intentionally focused on consumer-facing metrics because those are the measures the company believes most directly drive performance.

She also stressed that the company is thinking about how to scale good habits across the system, and sees the event as a way to spread winning traits beyond the 150 honorees. The leaders who rise to the top, Beasley said, tend to be the ones who "lead from the front," communicate clearly, and take care of the team around them.

"Culture is fueling our results," Jamie Harrison, Taco Bell's global chief people and culture officer, told Business Insider. "We're a people-first culture, and we see that when we pour into our teams, like with Golden Bell, they also have a chance to do that for their teams, too."

Kimberly Hairrell, Taco Bell's GM of the Year, who received her second Golden Bell award this year, told Business Insider that her path to the top was shaped by 50-hour workweeks as she battled a cancer diagnosis, and a team that refused to let her carry the burden alone.

"My team is what made it happen," she said. For Hairrell, the award was less about personal recognition than about proving that "you can still achieve things that you set your mind to."

Noah Starkey, who won his first Golden Bell this year — his second year being the manager of his own store — described a similar mindset. He started as a crew member in college and worked his way up to GM over five years, and said the key to winning was not simply sales growth, but focus on customers, employees, and consistency.

Both Hairrell and Starkey shared a competitive nature, already setting their sights on achieving Golden Bell status next year.

That kind of internal competition is exactly what Taco Bell is trying to create: a system where top performers raise the bar for everyone else.

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