As the job market frets about the shrinking entry-level positions due to the rise of artificial intelligence, tech giant Cisco has taken a radically different approach. The company's president and chief product officer, Jitu Patel, tasked a 27-year-old engineer with rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code in just 24 months using AI tools.
As the job market frets about the shrinking entry-level positions due to the rise of artificial intelligence, tech giant Cisco has taken a radically different approach. The company's president and chief product officer, Jitu Patel, tasked a 27-year-old engineer with rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code in just 24 months using AI tools.
The main character of this initiative was Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, nicknamed "Paddy". He joined Cisco after the company acquired his startup EzDubs in 2023. Despite the experience of leading his own project, Krishnamurthy worked for a long time in a position that was five levels below his potential and was engaged in non-strategic tasks, writes Tom's Hardware.
During a meeting in the San Francisco office, Krishnamurthy told Patel that he could completely revamp Cisco’s aging infrastructure with a team of just two people. Impressed by such a bold vision, the top manager gave the young engineer complete freedom of action and unlimited tokens to use AI models. The first four weeks were devoted to testing the concept.
The rapid growth of AI for writing code has already created a huge load on infrastructure (in particular, GitHub had to deploy an additional 4 million processor cores and 160 petabytes of memory). At the same time, the autonomous use of artificial intelligence carries many risks - there are known cases when AI agents accidentally deleted databases or destroyed production environments.
Cisco's management sees attracting young "AI-native" specialists as a key driver for the company's development. According to Patel, traditional corporate structures inevitably hinder innovation if they do not open the door to specialists early in their careers, because they bring a fresh perspective and fundamentally new ideas.
At the same time, the emergence of young engineers alongside veterans creates a natural tension between generations and approaches. The company considers this a positive factor — such healthy competition and “conflict of ideas” only stimulate the search for better solutions and prevent the team from stagnating.
Ultimately, Cisco sees the greatest potential in the synergy of different experiences. Combining the knowledge of specialists who know how to scale business processes with the energy of young entrepreneurs who think in terms of artificial intelligence from the very beginning can yield maximum results for the company's transformation.
