Coinbase trials ‘Fred’ and ‘Balaji’ AI agents in Slack, Email

Coinbase has begun internal tests of AI agents that appear inside Slack and email to help employees with work tasks, CEO Brian Armstrong posted on X. The company deployed two assistants modeled on former executives as part of the trial.

One agent, named Fred after co-founder Fred Ehrsam, is described as a strategic executive agent that offers clarity, priority alignment and executive-level feedback. The second agent, called Balaji and modeled on former CTO Balaji Srinivasan, is designed to challenge assumptions and encourage creative thinking.

Employees can interact with the agents in Slack channels and email as they would with colleagues. Armstrong wrote that it will soon be simple for any employee to create an agent for themselves or their team and predicted the firm may have more agents than human employees in the near future: ‘Soon, it will be easy for any employee to spin up a new agent for themselves or their team. I suspect we will have more agents than human employees at some point soon.’

The tests follow previous internal goals to expand AI use across the company. Armstrong has pushed for more than half of Coinbase’s code to be written by AI and for the workforce to become ‘AI-Natives.’ Coinbase also launched the x402 protocol in May 2025 to enable agent-driven payments on crypto and fiat rails.

The company has not announced a full rollout or any staffing changes tied to the experiments. The Coinbase review describes the work as part of ongoing efforts to embed AI into workflows and evaluate how agent tools affect productivity and decision-making.