A 27-year-old engineer who nearly got buried in a pile of emails now controls Cisco's nearly unlimited AI compute budget. According to Fortune, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel handed Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy (colleagues call him "Paddy") a wild assignment: use AI to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months, with no budget ceiling.

From the Margins to the Core

Paddy is not a nobody. He co-founded the real-time translation startup EzDubs in 2023 and joined Cisco in 2025 as part of Cisco's acquisition of the company. But in Patel's eyes, the former founder and CEO was at the time "buried deep in the organization, doing marginal work that had little bearing on the big picture." The turning point came during an in-depth conversation when Patel was visiting the San Francisco office—Paddy put forward a proposal: with just a two-person team, he could completely overhaul Cisco's massive old codebase. Patel admitted that even the most forward-thinking AI experts on his own team had not dared to think that way. So he threw out the line: "Go for it. Do whatever you want."

Ambition and Unknowns Coexist

The real hard targets are fully spelled out: a four-week validation period, a 24-month deadline, and a 98% coverage goal. But Patel also knows that 98% is for now only a "target set," not an arrow that has already hit the mark—the report did not disclose how much has been changed so far or whether the experiment is actually working. For a veteran tech giant with sprawling, complex systems, betting its core legacy code on a young man plus AI is a burden it cannot shake off: legacy code embedded into modern systems for compatibility with old features, poorly documented and expensive to maintain. This move is both an aggressive bet on efficiency and an exposure of the heavy burden of traditional software maintenance models. Whether it succeeds or fails probably will not be clear until the two-year deadline has run its course.