Goldman Sachs is testing viral AI agent Devin as a ‘new employee’

In a significant move signaling the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in finance, investment banking giant Goldman Sachs is embracing Cognition’s viral AI coding agent, Devin, as a “new employee.” Marco Argenti, Goldman Sachs’ Chief Information Officer, confirmed the strategic integration in a statement to CNBC, highlighting a pioneering step in augmenting its substantial workforce.

“We’re going to start augmenting our workforce with Devin, which is going to be like our new employee,” Argenti stated, revealing ambitious plans to deploy hundreds of Devin instances, with potential scalability to thousands. This initiative is particularly notable for a firm that currently boasts approximately 12,000 human developers, indicating a substantial shift towards an AI-assisted development model.

Despite the financial industry often being perceived as conservative regarding technological adoption, Goldman Sachs has consistently demonstrated a forward-thinking approach. The firm has been leveraging developer copilots internally since at least 2024, as documented in its annual reports, underscoring its commitment to technological innovation.

Devin, developed by Cognition, captured widespread attention upon its release, particularly across social media platforms, for its promise as an autonomous AI software engineer. However, its initial iterations faced scrutiny, with some researchers noting its struggles with more intricate coding tasks.

Cognition has since advanced the agent, with Devin now on version 2.1 as of May. The developers assert that the latest version performs optimally when operating within large codebases, where it can access extensive contextual information to guide its problem-solving and development processes.

Crucially, Goldman Sachs emphasizes that Devin’s integration is not intended to replace human developers but rather to foster a “hybrid” workforce. Each instance of Devin will operate under human supervision, with the primary objective of enhancing human developers’ productivity and efficiency. This collaborative model aims to harness AI’s capabilities for repetitive or complex coding tasks, allowing human experts to focus on higher-level strategic work and problem-solving.