Forgotten in the organization chart, 27-year-old professional becomes Cisco's bet for the AI era
Cisco delivered unlimited tokens and a strategic mission to a professional five levels below the president, amid a drop in entry vacancies.
BY THE X-TRADER NEWS NEWSROOM · REPORTING FROM INFOMONEY · 3 MIN
According to the organizational chart, the professional was five levels below the executive who decided to entrust him with one of the company's most important missions. According to InfoMoney, which cites a report from Fortune, Jeetu Patel, president and product director at Cisco, says he handed this task over to Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, known as Paddy, who is 27 years old.
Patel's gesture was concrete. He gave Paddy unlimited tokens to refactor code, that is, to reorganize and rewrite programming systems with the support of artificial intelligence tools. Tokens are the text units that these models process, and it is this consumption that the task relies on.
Paddy's trajectory helps to understand the bet. He founded EzDubs in 2023, a real-time translation startup. In 2025, Cisco acquired the company and he joined the company.
The case draws attention at a time when the entry point to the job market is narrower. According to the report, entry vacancies are falling and companies plan to hire fewer recent graduates because of AI. In this scenario, the story of a young man with high-level responsibility works as a counterpoint to the general trend.
The move suggests that Cisco is willing to put talent and technical autonomy ahead of the formal hierarchy when it comes to artificial intelligence. The details, however, come from Patel's own statements, and the report does not provide measured results of the project.
What is at stake is whether the case is repeated in other areas of the company or whether it remains an isolated example, used to illustrate a broader strategy.
What changes for the investor
The episode does not include revenue, margin or hiring projections, which prevents measuring the direct impact on Cisco's results. For those who follow the company, the point of attention is how it distributes talent in the transition to AI. If the trend of hiring fewer recent graduates is confirmed in other technology companies, the discussion about costs and productivity could gain weight in the debate about the sector's margins. Until then, the most prudent reading is to treat the case as a sign of priorities, which only gains strength when it appears in launches, investments and balance sheets.
Automatically translated from Portuguese.
