# Cisco's Jeetu Patel Gave a 27 Year Old Unlimited AI Tokens to Rewrite the Company's Legacy Code

> Cisco president Jeetu Patel handed a 27 year old employee unlimited AI tokens to rewrite the company's legacy codebase, a bet he holds up as a model for how companies should put Gen Z and AI to work together.

- Source: Standard
- Canonical URL: https://standard.de.com/article/cisco-s-jeetu-patel-gave-a-27-year-old-unlimited-ai-tokens-to-rewrite-the-company-s-legacy-code
- Author: Giulia Bianchi
- Section: Leadership
- Published: 2026-10-30T13:05:50.595Z
- Updated: 2026-10-30T13:05:50.595Z
- Tags: Cisco, Artificial Intelligence, Gen Z, Hiring

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Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel has been pointing to a single internal experiment as a model for how he thinks companies should put Gen Z and AI to work together. Patel noticed Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, known at the company as Paddy, a 27 year old working five organizational levels below him in what Patel considered an unstrategic role.

Krishnamurthy had previously co founded EzDubs, a real time translation startup launched in 2023 that Cisco later acquired, bringing him into the company despite his founder and CEO experience going largely untapped in his day to day role.

Patel's response was to hand Krishnamurthy unlimited access to AI tokens and tell him to "go nuts" on Cisco's legacy codebase. Krishnamurthy came back with a plan to rewrite 98% of that legacy code within 24 months using a two person team, starting with a four week proof of concept to test the approach.

Patel argues companies should deliberately hire inexperienced workers specifically because they are more likely to challenge assumptions that more senior staff have stopped questioning. He treats interns as reverse mentors, recruits directly from college talks, and says he intentionally builds friction into his teams, pairing seasoned operators with outside systems thinkers and AI native founder types in roughly equal thirds, so long as the tension stays focused on ideas rather than personalities. He points to investors like Josh Kushner of Thrive Capital and entertainer Will.i.am as examples of others making a similar bet on young talent precisely because they carry fewer assumptions about what is and is not possible.

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Originally published by Standard. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://standard.de.com/article/cisco-s-jeetu-patel-gave-a-27-year-old-unlimited-ai-tokens-to-rewrite-the-company-s-legacy-code.