Cisco’s president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel says he has tasked a 27-year-old Gen Z engineer with using AI to rewrite much of the company’s “legacy” software. Multiple outlets report Patel has provided “unlimited tokens” and is aiming for a major code refactor effort over the next two years.
Fortune, echoed by other coverage, describes the engineer as an ex-founder “buried away” in Cisco’s organization until Patel met him and decided to elevate the project. The reporting says the engineer, identified as Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, joins Cisco in 2025 after Cisco’s acquisition of EzDubs, a real-time translation startup he helped found. Patel frames the effort as both a software modernization push and a way to bring in younger talent with a broader range of experience.
Outlets differ mainly in how they contextualize the move—some emphasize the unusual management decision and the “Gen Z” angle, while others focus on the practical goal of refactoring a large share of legacy code. Across sources, the core claims are that AI is being used, unlimited tokens are involved, and the target scope is large.
