A screen prominently displays the logo of Goldman Sachs on the bustling floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City on May 7, 2025. In a remarkable leap into the future of technology and finance, Goldman Sachs has announced that its newest hire is not a human being, but rather an advanced piece of software. The prestigious investment bank is currently testing an innovative autonomous software engineer developed by the artificial intelligence startup Cognition, which is poised to soon join the ranks of the firm's 12,000 human developers. This groundbreaking development was revealed by the bank's technology chief, Marco Argenti, during a recent interview with CNBC.

The AI program, cleverly named Devin, has been making waves in technology circles since last year when Cognition touted it as the world's first AI software engineer. Demonstration videos have showcased Devin's capabilities as a full-stack engineer, successfully completing complex, multi-step assignments with minimal human intervention. Such advancements signal a significant shift in how technology is integrated into the workplace, particularly in high-stakes environments like Wall Street.

Argenti elaborated, stating, "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." This initiative marks a pivotal moment in the application of artificial intelligence within the corporate realm. Initially, Goldman Sachs plans to deploy hundreds of instances of Devin, with the potential for this number to escalate into the thousands as various use cases are identified and developed.

This move is part of a broader trend of accelerating AI adoption across the corporate landscape. Just last year, major Wall Street firms, including JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, began implementing cognitive assistants powered by OpenAI models, helping employees become more familiar with the intricacies of AI technology. The introduction of agentic AI—such as Devin, which can perform not just basic tasks but also complex jobs such as building entire applications—signals a much larger transformation with significant potential rewards for productivity and efficiency.

Notably, tech giants like Microsoft and Alphabet have reported that AI is already responsible for generating about 30% of the code in some projects, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claiming that AI now handles up to 50% of the workload at his company. In the case of Goldman Sachs, Argenti suggests that this more sophisticated form of AI could dramatically enhance employee productivity, potentially increasing output by three to four times compared to previous AI tools.

Importantly, Devin will not operate independently; it will be supervised by human employees who will delegate tasks that are often deemed tedious by engineers. These tasks include updating internal code to align with newer programming languages, thus allowing human developers to focus on more complex and creative challenges.