Cisco gives employee unlimited AI tokens to help rewrite 98% of its legacy code

Cisco has spent more than four decades developing networking hardware and software for businesses. Now, a 27-year-old employee has proposed using AI to help rewrite 98% of its legacy code. Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer (CPO) Jeetu Patel, who oversees the company’s product strategy and development, has backed the idea with unlimited AI tokens, telling him to “go nuts.”

Patel’s decision followed a conversation at Cisco’s San Francisco office with Paddy Krishnamurthy, the cofounder and former CEO of real-time translation startup EzDubs. Cisco acquired the business in 2025, but Patel told Fortune that Krishnamurthy was “buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic,” five levels below him. His initial proposal was to tackle the overhaul with just one other person. Krishnamurthy has given himself four weeks to demonstrate the approach, with a goal of rewriting 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months.

Patel has since described the group of two or three people as a catalyst for a wider change in how Cisco develops software. Cisco’s core team would take ownership of the final product. He expects that approach to help engineers throughout the company modernise their code and build software at a pace they could not previously achieve. The changes could also support migration to memory-safe languages, designed to prevent memory errors that can lead to security flaws. Although some experiments may fail, Patel said the potential gains make them worth pursuing.

Patel said even his more AI-focused colleagues had not considered tackling the project with so few people. He wants younger hires to question established approaches, pointing to a Stanford student who earned an internship after following through on his request for monthly updates about what she was learning about AI. Once at Cisco, she tackled a redesign experienced staff had struggled with. Patel described interns as reverse mentors, saying they were brought in to teach colleagues different ways of thinking rather than do routine data entry.

Josh Kushner, founder of venture capital firm Thrive Capital, also prefers hires with fewer than four years of industry experience. Alon Chen, CEO of AI platform Tastewise, is hiring people with none, saying they bring fewer assumptions about how work should be done.