Every week, you are bound to stumble upon an account of a CEO or prominent entity in the tech space, urging everyone to embrace AI with open arms and adopt it as their copilot. Google and a couple of other tech firms have initiated formal training with AI tools for their human workforces, all in a bid to multiply productivity and release more time for creative aspirations. Coinbase, however, took a different approach – one where its employees were fired just because they refused to adopt AI.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, has revealed that he fired engineers who failed to adopt AI coding tools. The surprising decision was described as ‘heavy-handed’ but necessary to accelerate the company’s AI integration. Armstrong shared the details of his push for AI adoption during a recent interview on the “Cheeky Pint” podcast with Stripe President John Collison.
Coinbase CEO directs engineers to learn AI tools
In order to stay competitive, Armstrong had pressured his teams to adopt AI at a faster pace. However, the teams were projecting a slow growth pace, which led to the CEO aligning towards drastic measures.
“Originally they were coming back and saying, ‘All right, over the next quarter… we’re going to get to 50% (AI) adoption.’ I said, ‘You’re telling me— why can’t every engineer just onboard by the end of the week?’” said Armstrong.
The CEO then gave all his teams a deadline to adopt AI within a week. In a message, which was broadcast over Slack for internal employees, Armstrong wrote, “AI’s important. We need you to all learn it and at least onboard. You don’t have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least on board by the end of the week. And if not, I’m hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn’t done it and I’d like to meet with you to understand why.”
CEO takes drastic step to encourage AI adoption
However, when the Saturday meeting arrived, Armstrong said that a small number of employees were non-compliant with the new AI mandate. Armstrong said, “I jumped on this call on Saturday, and there were a couple of people who had not done it. Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn’t, and they got fired.”
When asked whether this firing was too harsh for the affected employees, Armstrong said, “Some people really didn’t like it, by the way, that heavy-handed approach, but I think it did set some clarity at least that we need to lean into this and learn about it.”
The result?
Armstrong says that after the AI mandate was pushed, 33 per cent of all code writing at Coinbase was done by AI bots. The company, however, plans to increase that number to 50 per cent by the end of this quarter.
