Goldman Sachs’ tech boss says tracking individual AI usage isn’t useful. He just watches how fast his 12,000 engineers move from idea to production

Goldman Sachs chief information officer Marco Argenti thinks monitoring every employees’ AI use is the wrong way to measure whether it’s actually making people more productive.

As companies increasingly push employees to adopt the technology to try to spur productivity, Goldman’s Argenti is taking a different approach by measuring how quickly his engineering teams can move from coming up with an idea to actually executing on it. 

Even though the investment bank can see exactly how much each of its employees uses AI, including the 12,000 engineers Argenti oversees, laser-focusing on that detail isn’t helpful, he told Business Insider. 

“It would be like looking at only one player on the field,” Argenti said. “Fine, this player is doing more movements, but why am I not scoring more goals? Well, because they need to pass the ball.”

What works better, he added, is measuring the speed at which a team can develop a feature, which he said you can see because suddenly a productive team’s work backlog starts shrinking rapidly. 

AI tools have helped the bank’s employees go from creating PowerPoints for their ideas to creating prototypes that can be adjusted in real time based on feedback, he added.

“There’s zero time between idea and prototype. You kind of “3D print” software,” Argenti...