2 Engineers, Unlimited Tokens And Cisco’s 98% Rewrite

By PYMNTS
Publication Date: 2026-11-02 18:59:00

Cisco has handed a single engineer an unlimited artificial intelligence (AI) budget to replace nearly all of its legacy code within two years. Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel told Fortune that Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, a 27-year-old engineer who joined through Cisco’s 2025 acquisition of translation startup EzDubs, gave himself four weeks to prove the approach, with a final goal of refactoring 98% of the company’s legacy code within 24 months. “I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel said.

Krishnamurthy told Patel he could do the job with a two-person team. The budget line that changes is spending on AI tokens, not engineers.

That math matters for banks, where old code comes with big maintenance bills. Large financial institutions put 70% to 85% of their IT budgets toward maintaining older systems, Amazon Web Services said. Estimates from IT services firm DXC show 45 of the world’s 50 largest banks rely on…

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