Cognition’s Devin is Good at Brownfield Engineering, Says Infosys CTO

Infosys is deploying Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin specifically for brownfield enterprise modernisation, positioning the autonomous coding agent as a tool for navigating complex legacy systems rather than building greenfield applications from scratch.

At Infosys Investor AI Day 2026, Rafee Tarafdar, Chief Technology Officer, said the partnership is focused on legacy-heavy environments. “...our Cognition partnership is largely to use Devin for a lot of brownfield engineering, because we find that is really good at it,” he said.

The comment came as Infosys outlined how it is integrating AI-native capabilities into enterprise services through its Infosys Topaz platform.

Last month, Infosys announced a collaboration with US-based Cognition to deploy Devin, described as the world’s first AI software engineer, across Infosys’ internal engineering operations and client engagements globally.

In an announcement statement, Infosys had earlier said the collaboration is aimed at accelerating software development, improving engineering productivity, and reducing time-to-market for global enterprises.

The Indian IT company said it has been using Devin internally for the past six months and has seen improvements in engineering quality and efficiency.

While Tarafdar did not elaborate on why Devin is suited for brownfield work, Cognition’s own materials highlight capabilities that align with legacy modernisation.

In a 2025 performance review, Cognition said Devin has been used for “migrating and modernising repos,” addressing static analysis findings, and performing large-scale code upgrades — tasks typical of brownfield engineering .

The company has also described Devin’s ability to generate documentation for large repositories and work across full development cycles, including debugging and pull request management.

Devin is positioned as an autonomous software engineer that can explore repositories, execute code, fix issues, and iterate — functions particularly relevant in legacy estates where undocumented dependencies and technical debt are common .

Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani, speaking separately at the same event, underscored the scale of the challenge. “Taking brownfield systems and modernising them is a hell of a lot more difficult than doing greenfield development,” he said.

After Infosys, Cognizant also partnered with Cognition to help enterprises apply AI to software development work at scale.

Cognizant said unlike traditional coding assistants that suggest code, Devin can take on end-to-end development tasks independently, planning, executing and validating work across complex systems.

“AI is fundamentally transforming how software is built. At Cognizant, 30% of our code is already generated with AI, and we aim to reach 50% in the near future. But achieving this requires more than powerful models or tools,” Ravi Kumar S, Chief Executive Officer of Cognizant said, adding that the partnership will help clients modernise faster.