On May 7, 2025, you will see the Goldman Sachs company logo on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
The latest employment at Goldman Sachs is not human.
The bank is testing autonomous software engineers with artificial intelligence startup recognition and is expected to soon join the company’s 12,000 human developer ranks, Goldman Tech chief Marco Argenti told CNBC.
The program, named Devin, became known in its technology circles last year for its cognitive claims that it created the world’s first AI software engineer. The demo video showed that the program acts as a full stack engineer and completes multi-step assignments with minimal intervention.
“We’re going to start growing our workforce with Devin when we become like a new employee trying to start something on behalf of our developers,” Argenti said in an interview this week.
“In the beginning there are hundreds of Devins. [and] Depending on the use case, it could be thousands,” he said.
This is the latest indicator of the dizzying speeds that AI is employed in the corporate world. Last year, Wall Street companies, including JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, deployed cognitive assistants based on the Openai model to make employees tech-savvy.
Currently, Agent AI Arrivals on Wall Street – See programs like Devin that help people with tasks like document summary and email creation.
Tech giants, including Microsoft and Alphabet, have said that AI is already producing around 30% of the code on several projects, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said last month that AI is handling 50% of his company’s work.
According to Argenti, at Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s top investment banks, this more powerful AI AI could increase workers’ productivity at a rate of up to three to four times as much as previous AI tools.
Devin is supervised by human employees and handles tasks that often involve drighery, such as engineers updating internal code to a new programming language, he said.
Enlarge the icon aro and point it outwards
AI software developer Devin is valued at nearly $4 billion by a startup called Cognition Labs and counts Peter Thiel’s Founder Fund as investors.
Courtesy: Goldman Sachs
Goldman is the first major bank to use Devin, according to Cognition, which was founded by a trio of engineers in late 2023.
In March, the startup doubled its valuation to nearly $4 billion just a year after Devin’s release. The company counts notable venture capitalists and co-founders of Palantir Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale among investors.
Goldman does not own cognitive stocks, according to people with knowledge of the issues that were refused to talk about bank investments.
Hybrid Workforce
The bank’s move could cause fresh anxiety on Wall Street and beyond about job cuts as a result of AI.
Executives from Amazon to Ford have grown more openly about what AI means in their recruitment plans. Bloomberg’s research arm said in January that it will cut jobs of up to 200,000 over the next three to five years as banks around the world implement AI.
On his part, Argenti, who joined Goldman from Amazon in 2019, had a vision for the near future called the “hybrid workforce” in which humans and AI coexist.
“It’s really about people and AIS working side by side,” Argenti said. “It is expected that engineers will have the ability to actually explain the problem in a coherent way and turn it into a prompt… and be able to oversee the work of those agents.”
The role of software developers is most useful for training called reinforcement learning, which is used to make AI smarter, but according to Argenti, other roles in banks aren’t too far from being automated.
“These models are basically just as good as other developers. They’re really cool,” Argenti said. “So I think it also serves as evidence to expand elsewhere.”
