What happened
Cisco president Jeetu Patel gave Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, an ex-EzDubs founder acquired in 2023, the job of refactoring 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months, with unlimited AI tokens.
Why it matters
Patel pulled Krishnamurthy from a role five levels below, calling his prior work 'unstrategic' — a bet that AI can let a young outsider overhaul code at a company Cisco's size.
WHO IT HITSCIO and engineering leadership teams at large enterprises weighing whether to hand legacy modernization to small, AI-armed teams rather than traditional large engineering orgs may see this as a template — or a cautionary test.
Summaries like this, every morning.
Cisco's decision stands out against the backdrop: youth unemployment is growing as AI replaces more entry-level jobs. Rather than shielding junior employees from AI-driven change, Cisco president Jeetu Patel is betting on a young engineer to lead a large-scale code modernization effort. The employee, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, came to Cisco through its 2023 acquisition of EzDubs, a translation startup he helped build — an acquisition that brought in executive experience but, per Patel, left him 'buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic.'
The assignment — refactoring 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months with unlimited AI tokens — pairs an aggressive deadline with an unusually open-ended resource grant. Patel's instruction to 'go nuts' suggests Cisco is treating the effort as a test of how far AI-assisted coding can go when constraints on tool usage are removed. It also signals a willingness to route strategic work to newcomers rather than tenured teams.
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Jeetu Patel handed Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy—who joined via Cisco's EzDubs acquisition—unlimited tokens and fo…
