Cisco has handed a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens and a staggering mandate: rebuild 98% of the company’s legacy codebase within 24 months. The move comes straight from Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel, who plucked the young former startup founder from obscurity five levels down the corporate ladder.
The decision arrives as youth unemployment climbs and AI continues erasing entry-level positions across the tech sector. Meanwhile, AI coding tools have exploded in popularity over recent months, with GitHub alone deploying 4 million extra CPU cores and 160 petabytes of storage to handle the surge in AI-generated code. The practice carries real risks too. Rogue AI agents have wiped entire company databases, deleted TV show edits weeks before release, and wrecked production environments.
Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy joined Cisco through its 2023 acquisition of EzDubs, a translation startup he helped build. Despite his executive experience, Patel found him “buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic.” That changed during a conversation at Cisco’s San Francisco office, where Krishnamurthy claimed he could rewrite the legacy code with a team of just two people. Patel admitted that even the most AI-forward members of his own team hadn’t considered that approach.
The young engineer now gets four weeks for a proof of concept. Patel’s instruction to him: “you can go nuts.” Unlimited tokens, no guardrails on ambition.
Patel wants more hires like Krishnamurthy, both internal and external, people who will “challenge the system and the status quo” and act as an “energizer bunny that just goes and kind of revs everyone up.” He argues that corporate hierarchies block fresh thinking. Without early-career workers pushing against established norms, he asks, where do new ideas come from?
The president acknowledges this creates friction between Gen Z employees and veteran staff. “Tension is good,” he said, drawing a line between friction over ideas versus friction between people. His formula for success: combine experienced Cisco operators, external hires, and “entrepreneurial founders, CEOs and engineers who are AI-native.” Alone, none of these groups packs much punch. Together, Patel believes, they create magic.
