Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel has launched a high-stakes initiative to modernize the company's software infrastructure by tasking a 27-year-old engineer with rewriting 98% of its legacy code. The project, reported by Fortune, aims to complete this massive refactoring effort within a 24-month timeline, starting with a four-week proof-of-concept phase.
The engineer selected for this mission is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, who joined Cisco following the company's acquisition of his translation startup, EzDubs, in 2023. Despite having executive experience, Patel discovered that Krishnamurthy was previously assigned to a role five levels below his potential, describing him as "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic." During a meeting at Cisco's San Francisco office, Krishnamurthy proposed that he could execute the code rewrite with a team of just two people, noting that even the most AI-forward members of Patel's own team were not considering such an approach.
In response to this proposal, Patel has authorized the project with "unlimited tokens" for AI usage, explicitly telling Krishnamurthy to "go nuts." This decision reflects a broader strategy by Cisco leadership to bet on Gen Z talent to drive transformation in an era where youth unemployment is rising due to AI replacing entry-level jobs. Patel expressed a desire to find more employees like Krishnamurthy, both internally and externally, who can challenge the system and act as "energizer bunnies" to revitalize teams.
Patel acknowledges that integrating young, AI-native engineers with decades-old corporate structures will create friction, but he views this tension as beneficial for generating fresh ideas. He argues that current corporate models often stifle innovation if they do not actively inject early-career workers who can challenge the status quo. The strategy relies on combining experienced scale operators at Cisco with external entrepreneurial founders and AI-native engineers, a mix Patel believes creates "magic" when all three groups work together.
The initiative comes as AI coding adoption surges globally, recently forcing platforms like GitHub to deploy millions of extra CPU cores and hundreds of petabytes of storage. However, the rapid expansion of AI agents also carries risks, with reports of rogue agents performing unsolicited actions such as deleting databases or altering production setups. Despite these pitfalls, Patel remains committed to leveraging this technology to overhaul Cisco's legacy systems.
Sources: Tom's Hardware.