Coinbase lays off 14% of staff as it restructures around AI
Coinbase announced a 14% workforce reduction Tuesday, joining a wave of tech layoffs the company attributes to reorganizing around artificial intelligence capabilities. CEO Brian Armstrong said in an employee email that the company is "fundamentally changing how we operate, rebuilding the company as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it."
The San Francisco crypto firm is not alone. Meta, Block, and Amazon have announced similar cuts in recent months, according to Roger Lee, founder of layoffs.fyi, which tracks tech industry workforce reductions since 2020.
The strategy behind the cuts
Company leaders say reducing headcount allows them to restructure teams to use AI more productively. The reasoning is straightforward: fewer people organized differently can accomplish more with AI tools handling routine work.
Ahmed Banafa, an engineering professor at San Jose State University, noted the pattern. "What leaders at Block and today at Coinbase are saying is that in order to take advantage of the power of AI, we need to reduce our headcount and realign our org chart so that the teams are constructed so they can use AI more productively," he said.
New jobs emerging, but questions remain
AI will create new roles, Banafa said. Companies will need people to oversee teams of AI agents and manage workflows that blend human and machine work.
But retraining efforts lag. Banafa cited a New York Times report showing Congress allocated $160 million for retraining programs-an amount he called insufficient for the scale of disruption.
Shivam Goyal, a software engineer who moved to San Francisco three months ago, uses AI daily for coding. He views it as a tool rather than a replacement. "I still believe that AI is like a co-pilot sort of thing. And it's not something that could easily replace human beings," he said.
Yet Goyal acknowledges the reality: friends in India have been recently laid off. A Silicon Valley saying captures the tension: AI will not take your job. People who know how to use AI will.
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