Coinbase has begun piloting AI agents inside Slack and email to help employees with everyday tasks, CEO Brian Armstrong said in a post on X. The move is part of a broader push to embed AI into routine workflows across the company.
Armstrong said two agents are already deployed, each modeled after former executives. One, called Fred and inspired by co‑founder Fred Ehrsam, functions as a strategic executive agent to help with clarity, priority alignment and executive‑style feedback. The other, Balaji, modeled after former CTO Balaji Srinivasan, is designed to provoke creative thinking and challenge assumptions.
Armstrong suggested the rollout will make it simple for employees to create new agents for themselves or their teams, and predicted agents may soon outnumber human staff. He has also been vocal about increasing automation across Coinbase — in September he said he wants AI to write more than half of the company’s code — and the firm has stated a goal of making its roughly 4,000 employees AI‑native.
Beyond internal tools, Coinbase has been active in the broader agentic AI ecosystem. In May 2025 the company launched the x402 protocol to enable payments by agents across crypto and fiat rails, reflecting a bet that agentic AIs will transact autonomously online.
Observers in the crypto and payments space expect AI agents to grow rapidly. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has forecast billions of AI agents transacting onchain within a few years, and former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has called crypto the ‘‘native currency for AI agents,’’ predicting agents will handle tasks like ticket purchases and bill payments without traditional credit cards.
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