Goldman Sachs is testing an autonomous software engineer created by the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Cognition. This autonomous coder is set to be the firm’s latest “hire,” and would soon join the ranks of its 12,000 employees, according to Goldman Sachs’ Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti.
“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 in an interview with CNBC. “Devin” is the name given to this program, which had become known within technology circles last year with demo videos showing it operating as a full-stack engineer, completing multi-step assignments with minimal intervention.
“Initially, we will have hundreds of Devins [and] that might go into the thousands, depending on the use cases,” Argenti added.
This comes amid a greater push towards AI in Wall Street. In 2024, Wall Street Firms like JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley started rolling out cognitive assistants based on OpenAI models to get employees acquainted with the technology. Now, agentic AI has also entered the picture, with referencing programs like Devin being used. These programs don’t just help humans with tasks like summarizing documents or writing emails, but instead execute complex multi-step jobs like building entire apps.
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Argenti said that Devin will be supervised by human employees, and will handle jobs considered “drudgery,” like updating internal code to newer programming languages.
The increased adoption of AI across industries have sparked concerns about the role of human employees, and their job security. AI has been associated with the increased number of layoffs in many companies, particularly within the tech industry. CBS reports that new labor data shows layoffs across the U.S. have surged to their highest level since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the economy in 2020.
Bloomberg’s research arm said in January that banks around the world will cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as they implement AI.
Argenti, however, envisions a world where humans and AI work side by side.
“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.”
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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, Argenti believes that other roles are not far off from being automated. “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.”
Regardless of how it is used, AI seems to have a palpable effect on the workforce, and workplace dynamics. A recent report by J. Thelander Consulting, a compensation data and consulting firm for the private capital market revealed that many companies are “strategically overpaying” recruits with AI experience, offering premiums of as much as $200,000 for some roles.
The report, which was compiled from a compensation analysis of roles across 153 companies, showed that data scientists and analysts with machine learning skills received a higher premium than software engineers with the same skills. However, the consulting firm also tracked a rise in bonuses for lower-level software engineers and analysts.