Cisco has been big on using AI to boost its internal productivity for some time, but now the networking giant has reportedly given a 27-year-old staffer nicknamed Paddy “unlimited tokens” to rework its entire codebase.
Cisco Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel told Fortune that Paddy – real name Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy – has been tasked with refactoring 98% of Cisco’s entire legacy code in 24 months.
The mammoth tokenmaxxing project marks the latest Patel-led effort to augment the company’s productivity through AI. Cisco was among the early trumpeters of OpenAI's Codex code assistance tool. In the months since, SDxCentral’s new AI Infrastructure Supplement details how Cisco’s AI-assisted development efforts resulted in its engineers slashing project build times by as much as 20%, while also amassing an apparent 15-times increase in defect resolution throughput.
Patel’s prodigy joined Cisco back in 2025 via its acquisition of translation startup EzDubs, a purchase that Patel said resulted in Krishnamurthy being "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic.”
Now with just a two-person team, the 27-year-old is free to “go nuts” – essentially affirming Patel’s expectations that approximately 70% of the networking giant’s product portfolio will be fully AI-generated by the end of 2027.
An exclusive SDxCentral interview at Cisco’s headquarters earlier this year saw the exec reveal some 85% of the company’s engineers were already using AI “on a regular” basis, adding: “We will by the end of the year probably have a half-dozen products, and by the end of next year, my thinking is we'll have about 70% of our entire portfolio at Cisco by the end of the calendar year ’27, they'll be fully built with AI, no human lines of code.”
Having secured one champion for the next generation of Cisco, Patel seemingly has sights on adding more Paddys, telling Fortune he wants more young hires to be “an energizer bunny that just goes out and kind of revs everyone up.”
“I actually try to create tension in the teams because you want to have enough friction on the ideas. You don’t want to have friction with people and personalities,” Patel said about adding younger staff to the Cisco status quo. “What you have to do is establish enough trust with people to say you are going to be expected to create unreasonable goals for yourself. And so in order to go out and achieve those unreasonable goals, think outside of the box.”
Patel has already instilled what he described as a broad range of experience in the team around him, revealing that roughly one-third are experienced operators who understand how the Cisco engine works.
“The second third are systems thinkers from the market who bring the outside-in perspective,” Patel added. “The final third is made of entrepreneurial founders, CEOs, and engineers who are AI-native [and] operate in founder mode. Either of these groups by themselves aren’t nearly as potent as when all three work together. It’s what creates magic.”
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