A Coinbase AI coaching culture is taking shape at the top of the company, with chief technology officer Balaji Witoff saying he receives some of the best professional feedback of his career from an AI agent, even as the cryptocurrency platform cuts roughly 700 roles and rethinks how its teams are structured.
Witoff said the coaching tool is part of a broader effort to embed what he calls ‘a culture of proactive coaching’ across the company. The agent focuses on two recurring themes: communication and delegation.
On communication, the AI tells Witoff when he is not being direct or clear enough, prompting him to sharpen his message or articulate a cleaner strategy. On delegation, it flags when he has gone ‘too in the weeds’ and should step back to focus on strategy while leaving execution to others.
‘Not so I can be micromanaged,’ Witoff said. ‘So I can get good feedback to be the best version of myself I can be.’
The appeal, he said, is impartiality. An AI agent, unlike a colleague or a direct report, is not afraid to deliver uncomfortable truths.
Layoffs and the Coinbase AI Coaching Culture Shift
The CTO’s experiment sits inside a far-reaching restructuring announced on 5 May 2026. Coinbase laid off 14% of its workforce, approximately 700 employees, eliminating what it described as ‘pure managers’ as it pivots toward smaller, flatter teams built around individual contributors. On some teams, a single person now serves simultaneously as engineer, designer, and product manager.
In his memo to staff, CEO Brian Armstrong was direct about the rationale. ‘We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core,’ CNBC reported him as writing.
The structural changes are specific. The Wall Street Journal reported that the plan caps the management hierarchy at a maximum of five layers below the C-suite, with managers permitted as many as 15 direct reports. The effect is to compress decision-making chains and push accountability down to individual contributors rather than supervisory layers.
Reuters reported that Coinbase expects to incur restructuring charges of approximately $50 million to $60 million, primarily related to severance and employee benefits, with the process expected to be substantially complete in the second quarter of 2026. Affected US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks of base pay, with two additional weeks per year of service, their next equity vesting, and six months of healthcare coverage.
A Broader Tech Wave and Coinbase’s Prior Cuts
Clear Street analyst Owen Lau said, ‘With still subdued trading volumes and weak sentiment, we see the action as supportive of forward profitability,’ and noted that management is reshaping teams around AI-driven workflows, signalling a longer-term push for higher productivity per employee, Reuters reported.
The move fits a wider pattern in the technology sector. CNBC reported that Block announced a reduction of nearly half its workforce earlier in 2026, and that Gemini Space Station, Pinterest, CrowdStrike, and Chegg have each made AI-attributed job cuts in recent months.
For Coinbase, it is also not the first time the company has made deep cuts. It laid off approximately 1,100 employees, around 18% of its workforce, in June 2022, citing deteriorating economic conditions and having grown too quickly, according to Investopedia. The May 2026 round is smaller in proportional terms but more explicitly tied to a structural redesign rather than a cyclical pullback.
Where the 2022 cuts were largely defensive, the stated aim now is to rebuild around an AI-first operating model: fewer managers, wider spans of control, and tools, including the AI coaching agent Witoff uses, intended to help the remaining leaders operate with greater clarity and speed.
Whether the Coinbase AI coaching culture delivers that productivity lift across the organisation will become clearer when the company reports results after the restructuring is complete, expected by the end of the second quarter of 2026.