Coinbase didn't just lay off 14% of its staff due to AI. It replaced managers with "player-coaches" and turned its org chart upside down

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is adapting the company for the AI age, cutting 14% of employees and reimagining its org chart to bring the company back to its startup roots.

Armstrong said the layoffs, which could affect just under 700 employees based on Coinbase’s last employee count, are partly due to a crypto downturn. Yet, the main motivator is making the company’s leadership structure flatter, enabling its employees to work fast, with AI at the forefront.

In practice, this means cutting what Armstrong dubs “pure managers,” opting instead for “player-coaches” who oversee team members, but are also strong individual contributors. The company is also planning to leverage its most AI savvy employees by creating “AI-native pods,” which could even include one-person teams directing agents that encompass the responsibilities of engineers, designers, and product managers.

“We are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it,” Armstrong wrote in a post on X.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/05/05/coinbase-layoffs-14-of-employees-ai-tech-ai-job-anxiety-crypto/?preview_id=4479239