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

Cognition’s AI coding agent Devin has scored a major customer: Goldman Sachs, the bank’s CIO, Marco Argenti, told CNBC.

“We’re going to start augmenting our workforce with Devin, which is going to be like our new employee,” Argenti told the outlet, adding that it plans to roll out hundreds of instances of Devin, potentially growing to thousands. The bank currently employs around 12,000 human developers, it says. 

Despite the financial industry’s reputation for being slow and stodgy, Goldman Sachs tends to be cutting edge, and it’s been internally using developer copilots since at least 2024, it said.

Devin is an interesting choice. When Cognition released it last year, it blew up on social media. Some researchers then found that it struggled with more complex coding work.

As of May, Devin is now on version 2.1, and Cognition says it performs best on large codebases that provide it with ample context. 

Devin won’t replace humans at the bank. Argenti advocates for a “hybrid” workforce, so instances of it will be supervised by a human and, he hopes, improve their productivity.