VTV.vn - With an unlimited source of tokens, this engineer only has 4 weeks to find a solution to rewrite 98% of Cisco's source code that was formed over decades.

While many businesses still debate the ability of AI to replace human resources, Cisco is betting on a different direction: giving young people the power to change technology systems that have existed for decades. The person assigned this responsibility is a 27-year-old engineer, with the privilege of using unlimited AI tokens and 4 weeks to prove an ambitious idea.

The character chosen by Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, commonly known as Paddy. He joined the American technology corporation in 2025, after Cisco acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup he co-founded in 2023.

Although he once held the position of CEO at a startup company, Paddy was not assigned a particularly important role after joining Cisco. Patel himself describes him as a talent who is "buried" in a less strategic position, five levels below him in the organizational structure.

Everything changed after Patel visited Cisco's office in San Francisco and had a chance to chat with Paddy. During the discussion, the young engineer proposed that Cisco's old source code system could be rewritten with just a team of two people. This idea surprised Patel, because even the most open-minded members of his team about AI had not thought about that possibility.

Instead of asking Paddy to present more lengthy plans, Patel decided to give him the opportunity to prove the idea. He provides an unlimited amount of AI tokens so young engineers can freely use models in the process of refactoring source code. Paddy has 4 weeks to prove his approach, before moving on to a bigger goal: rewriting 98% of Cisco's old source code within 24 months.

This is a significant scale task for any engineer, because Cisco's source code system has been developed and accumulated over decades. Instead of just assigning veteran employees with decades of experience, Cisco leaders placed their trust in a 27-year-old newcomer and gave him access to almost unlimited AI resources.

For Patel, this decision was more than just a technological experiment. He believes that businesses need young personnel to bring new ideas into the organization and question processes that have become routine. People with a lot of experience can still be creative, but sometimes they no longer ask the questions that a person not limited by experience would think of.

That perspective also led Patel to accept generational clashes within the company. He even actively created disagreements in ideas between Gen Z employees and those who have worked at Cisco for decades. According to him, the important thing is to create enough debate to challenge ideas, but not let them turn into personal conflicts.

Patel also applies this approach to interns. He sees them as reverse mentors, who can help longtime employees see work differently. An example is Baya, a 17-18 year old female student he met during a conversation with scholarship students at Stanford University.

Impressed with the way she listened, Patel asked Baya to send monthly emails to update her on what she'd learned about AI. This is also how he tests the ability to maintain commitment, instead of just evaluating a candidate through the initial conversation. Baya didn't miss a single report submission, then got an internship at Cisco and redesigned a system that previous experienced employees couldn't solve. Patel now wants to recruit her.

Cisco is not the only business betting on the younger generation of employees. Josh Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital and one of OpenAI's early investors, said he prioritizes candidates with less than four years of industry experience. When he founded the fund at the age of 26, Kushner also had difficulty attracting veteran employees, so he decided to look for young people who were smart and of the same generation as himself.

Meanwhile, Alon Chen, founder and CEO of AI platform Tastewise, also actively recruits people with no work experience. He believes that the younger generation growing up with AI has a way of thinking that is less limited by old stereotypes. Artist and investor Will.i.am is also looking for young talent at MIT and Stanford, believing that the next technological breakthroughs could come from this group.

In the long term, Patel predicts that the trend of recruiting young employees will continue to accelerate thanks to AI. He wants to build the Cisco team from three complementary groups: people with rich operational experience, experts with systems thinking from the market, and founders and engineers who understand AI and are able to work with a startup spirit.

This approach reflects a notable paradox of the AI-era labor market. While many businesses worry that technology could cause entry-level positions to disappear, some technology leaders see young people with little experience as a necessary resource to disrupt old ways of thinking. For Cisco, the problem is not only in how many lines of code AI can rewrite, but also in who is capable of seeing ways of doing things that long-standing organizations have never thought of.