Goldman Sachs autonomous coder pilot marks major AI milestone

The newest hire at Goldman Sachs isn’t human.

The bank is testing an autonomous software engineer from artificial intelligence startup Cognition that is expected to soon join the ranks of the firm’s 12,000 human developers, Goldman tech chief Marco Argenti told CNBC.

The program, named Devin, became known in technology circles last year with Cognition’s claim that it had created the world’s first AI software engineer. Demo videos showed the program operating as a full-stack engineer, completing multi-step assignments with minimal intervention.

“We’re going to start augmenting our workforce with Devin, which is going to be like our new employee who’s going to start doing stuff on the behalf of our developers,” Argenti said this week in an interview.

“Initially, we will have hundreds of Devins [and] that might go into the thousands, depending on the use cases,” he said.

It’s the latest indicator of the dizzying speed in which AI is being adopted in the corporate world. Just last year, Wall Street firms including JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley were rolling out cognitive assistants based on OpenAI models to get employees acquainted with the technology.

Now, the arrival of agentic AI on Wall Street — referencing programs like Devin that don’t just help humans with tasks like summarizing documents or writing emails, but instead execute complex multi-step jobs like building entire apps — signals a much larger shift, with greater potential rewards.

Tech giants including Microsoft and Alphabet have said AI is already producing about 30% of the code on some projects, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said last month that AI handles as much as 50% of the work at his company.

At Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s top investment banks, this more powerful form of AI has the potential to boost worker productivity by up to three or four times the rate of previous AI tools, according to Argenti.

Devin will be supervised by human employees and will handle jobs that engineers often consider drudgery, like updating internal code to newer programing languages, he said.

Goldman is the first major bank to use Devin, according to Cognition, which was founded in late 2023 by a trio of engineers and whose staff is reportedly stocked with champion coders.

In March, the startup doubled its valuation to nearly $4 billion just a year after the release of Devin. The company counts Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, the prominent venture capitalists and Palantir co-founders, among its investors.

Goldman doesn’t own a stake in Cognition, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who declined to be identified speaking about the bank’s investments.

Executives at companies from Amazon to Ford have grown more candid about what AI will mean for hiring plans. Banks around the world will cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as they implement AI, Bloomberg’s research arm said in January.

For his part, Argenti — who joined Goldman from Amazon in 2019 — charted out a vision for the near future that he called a “hybrid workforce” where humans and AI coexist.

“It’s really about people and AIs working side-by-side,” Argenti said. “Engineers are going to be expected to have the ability to really describe problems in a coherent way and turn it into prompts … and then be able to supervise the work of those agents.”

While the role of software developer is one that most lends itself to the type of training, called reinforcement learning, that is used to make AI smarter, other roles at a bank aren’t far off from being automated, according to Argenti.

“Those models are basically just as good as any developer, it’s really cool,” Argenti said. “So I think that will serve as a proof point also to expand it to other places.”