Goldman Sachs Taps AI for Autonomous Software Engineering Push

Goldman Sachs is moving rapidly into AI-driven software engineering, combining automated unit-test generation with autonomous coding agents. This shift signals a significant change in how one of the world's largest investment banks develops and assures software.

The bank has hundreds of instances of Devin, an autonomous software engineer developed by Cognition, operating alongside its approximately 12,000 human engineers and developers. Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti compared Devin to 'a new employee' and said it could be three to four times as productive as the AI coding tools previously used by the bank.

Goldman's initial use of Devin for legacy modernisation provides a potentially valuable but demanding use case. Many financial institutions continue to depend on applications built decades ago, sometimes using programming languages and architectures that are no longer widely understood.