Jeetu Patel has put a 27-year-old former startup founder on a fast-moving test inside Cisco: Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy has four weeks to prove he can help rewrite 98% of the company’s legacy code within 24 months. Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner that he gave Krishnamurthy unlimited AI tokens because he is going to refactor code, a striking mandate for someone who joined Cisco only after the company acquired EzDubs in 2025.
The reason people are looking at Patel now is simple: he is not just talking about AI in the abstract. He is using it to push one young engineer into a job that touches one of the most sensitive parts of Cisco’s business. Krishnamurthy, who cofounded EzDubs in 2023, believed he could tackle Cisco’s legacy code with a two-person team, and he gave himself four weeks to prove it before the bigger 24-month target comes due.
That is the weight of the assignment. Patel said he found Krishnamurthy buried five levels below him in the organization doing something unstrategic, then redirected him toward the kind of work that can change how a company thinks about its own systems. The choice matters because Cisco is trusting a very young hire to challenge a codebase built over years, and Patel has made clear he wants more people like Paddy who will challenge the system and the status quo.
The friction is built into that idea. Patel is asking for fresh eyes inside a company where seasoned staff have decades of experience, and he says that is exactly the point. He has described early-in-career workers as reverse mentors, said he looks for hungry students through college talks, and told one Stanford scholarship student, Baya, to email him every month about what she had learned about AI. She never missed a monthly email and later landed an internship at Cisco.
For Krishnamurthy, the next few weeks are the real test. Unlimited tokens can speed up refactoring, but they do not guarantee judgment, and Cisco’s target is not small: 98% of its legacy code, in 24 months, is a sweeping claim that now has to survive contact with reality. If the young founder can show that the approach works, Patel will have a case that Cisco can use AI and younger talent to move faster than its own history.
