As the race to develop AI agents on Wall Street heats up, one of the industry's largest fintechs has made the rare move of making its version available to anyone to use.
Block, billionaire Jack Dorsey's company behind Square, Afterpay, and Cash App, launched its AI agent, Goose, on Tuesday. Goose has been used internally to automate multi-day tasks in minutes, and even write code "better" and "faster" than some of Block's top engineers, Brad Axen, Block's lead AI engineer, told Business Insider.
Banks, hedge funds, and startups across Wall Street are racing to develop their own AI assistants to help with everything from coding to building stock-trading research and advising their clients on financial decisions. Finance firms are hoping that these agents can carry out multi-stepped tasks autonomously, helping employees not only do their jobs more efficiently but also allowing them to do tasks that weren't previously possible.
While fintechs' edge is often in the underlying technology intellectual property, Block is sharing Goose and basically everything under its hood by making it open source — thereby giving any engineer, rivals included, a shortcut to an AI agent framework to use, modify, and distribute, even for commercial purposes.
"Open source is a really big bet that we're making as a company," Jackie Brosamer, vice president of data and AI engineering at Block, told BI. "The risk is that openness isn't the best way to do a lot of these things," she added.
Block's AI agent took a team of about 12 AI and machine-learning experts, software engineers, and designers nine months to build. The fintech worked closely with Anthropic, an Amazon-backed AI startup, but it can work with any large-language model.
"We're trying to fulfill this bigger mission of economic empowerment and we see that as more than just beating our competitors" or "trying to win some section of the market," Bosamer said.
How Block employees are using Goose
Goose was initially built to help engineers with their daily tasks, like writing, editing, and testing code, and even correcting its own errors along the way. It's helping them by automating mundane but frequent tasks, like moving an old system to a new coding language or patching in new updates and making sure those updates don't impact other connected systems. Since it launched three months ago, it's been adopted by about 1,000 engineers (20% of Block's engineer population) who report that it's been saving them about 20% of their time, Axen said.
In one example, Block engineers prompted Goose to fully rewrite one platform in a different coding language. In just 30 minutes, Goose rewrote about 70% of the underlying code; Axen, a principal engineer with a philosophy and physics Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, said it would've taken him hours or even more than a day to do the same.
"People are great at coming up with ideas in a way that AI isn't yet. Once you agree on the right idea, it writes code better than I, it's faster than me," Axen said.
Brosamer said the company doesn't expect Goose to impact its hiring plans but "supercharge by 30% or even more our workforce going forward."
Soon after Block launched Goose with its engineering community, non-tech workers wanted to get in on the action. Designers and business employees started contributing ideas on how Goose could boost their day-to-day work, like plugging into Google Calendar to help them prep for meetings, Axen added. It also helps less-technical people write and understand code, like SQL, that's heavily used when working with data, Brosamer said.
Of course, Block will benefit from outside contributors to Goose who have made modifications or built out integrations with other apps, said Brosamer, adding that Block can "take those ideas and fold them back to our work rather than getting to it in six months when we needed it."
