AI has grown in popularity worldwide across a variety of industries. While AI has amazing use cases, enterprises are increasingly scrutinising their AI spending. And now, the AI startup Cognition has launched a new program to address concerns about return on investment. The company has announced an AI Productivity Guarantee for its coding agent Devin, promising eligible enterprise customers credits worth up to $10 million (approximately Rs 95 crore) if the AI fails to generate engineering value equal to its cost.
The announcement comes at a time when several major companies have reportedly become more cautious about AI-related expenses. Companies are increasingly looking beyond token usage and model interactions to determine whether AI tools produce measurable business results.
Cognition, the company behind Devin, stated that the initiative is made to transfer the conversation from AI consumption to productivity. For the unversed, Devin works as an autonomous software engineering agent capable of handling coding tasks, debugging and development workflows with very little human intervention.
In order to determine if customers are getting decent value, the company has developed an internal evaluation system which estimates productive engineering output. Instead of the usage through tokens or lines of code generated, the framework assesses completed Devin sessions and estimates how much time a human engineer would have needed to perform the same work.
As per Cognition CEO Scott Wu, the system evaluates whether the output would have been genuinely useful to an engineer and calculates its value based on estimated hours saved. Those hours are then translated into a monetary figure using a standard engineering rate and compared with a customer’s actual spending under an annual contract.
If the estimated value delivered by Devin falls below the amount paid by the customer, Cognition says it will provide compensation worth up to $10 million. However, the reimbursement will be issued as service credits rather than direct cash payments.
The company said the evaluation model was tested using feedback collected from enterprise users across hundreds of Devin sessions. The programme is currently available to qualifying enterprise customers using Devin Cloud at scale, while existing customers may also be eligible to participate.