Coinbase tests AI agents ‘Fred’ and ‘Balaji’ in Slack, email

Coinbase is piloting AI agents that appear inside employees' Slack channels and email to provide high-level feedback and help with strategic planning.

CEO Brian Armstrong posted a screenshot on X showing two agents named “Fred” and “Balaji” integrated into internal communications. “Fred” is described as a strategic executive agent that gives high-level feedback and helps refine documents, strategies and concepts. “Balaji” is described as an “agent of chaos and creativity” to assist employees on long-range initiatives.

Armstrong wrote that it will soon be easy for any employee to create a new agent for themselves or their team and added, “I suspect we will have more agents than human employees at some point soon.”

The pilot places the agents inside Slack channels and email threads so staff can consult them during normal workflows. The tools are set up to review documents, offer strategy input and support longer-term projects.

The two personas are modeled on former executives Fred Ehrsam and Balaji Srinivasan. Ehrsam served as Coinbase president from 2012 to 2017 and is now a co-founder of venture firm Paradigm. Srinivasan is a former chief technology officer and a long-time advocate for crypto technologies.

Armstrong wrote the company plans to move the agents beyond direct replicas of real people:

I think these employee agents should have their own name actually. Not a ‘digital twin' of someone else.

In February, Coinbase introduced Agentic Wallets, a feature that lets AI agents hold funds independently, send payments, trade tokens, earn yield and execute onchain transactions. That capability aligns with Coinbase's work on an x402 protocol to enable autonomous crypto payments without human intervention.

Coinbase did not provide a timeline for a broader rollout or say whether the agents will be offered outside the company.