Gen Z无法休息。 大约40%的老板说，他们计划雇用更少的毕业生，因为AI可以做更便宜的工作，Cisco的总裁兼首席产品官Jeetu Patel没有买，他刚刚将公司最大的工作交给了一个27岁的老人
「我给了他无限的象征，“所以我说，你可以去，你可以去疯了。”
“他”是Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy，即Paddy，他于2025年在4290亿技术巨头收购 EzDubs之后加入思科，实时翻译启动者Krishnamurthy于2023年共同创立。 尽管他曾经是一位有CEO经验的创始人，但用帕特尔的话来说，他还是“在组织里做了一些非战略性的事情 ”。
当Patel掉进Cisco的旧金山办公室，Krishnamurthy认为他可以用两人团队改写思科的遗产密码。 即使是自己团队中最有AI前卫的人
因此，他给了自己四周的时间来证明这一点，最终的目标是在24个月内重构98%的思科遗产代码。
现在，他正在寻找更多的帕迪人：年轻的聘请将“挑战制度和现状 ”，或者，正如他所说的那样，成为“一个刚出场的充满活力的兔子，让所有人都复活。
Cisco的总裁称 Gen Z应该教他的退伍军人
在大多数公司里，只有有数十年经验的人才会相信这样大的项目 Patel认为这是个问题。
“如果你不雇用早工，你只是让你的劳动力继续原样，如何挑战现状？”
Patel补充说，资深工作人员仍然可以提出新的想法。 他们不能问的问题
两人相处并不总能顺利。 帕泰尔承认，将一位Zer将军与数十年来一直在思科的人关在一起
“感应是好的”，他称。 “我实际上试图在团队中制造紧张，因为你想要在想法上有足够的摩擦。 你不希望与人和人格发生摩擦。
他补充说，“你必须做的是同人们建立足够多的信任，以表明你将被期待为自己创造不合理的目标。” “因此，为了走出去实现这些不合理的目标，要从框框之外思考。”
他不只是推高级职员从二十几岁开始服用指出。 他将每个实习生视为“反向导师”，甚至还在大学里演讲寻找“饥饿”的学生。
他最新的Gen Z赌注是从其中的一次演讲中出来的，对象是17岁和18岁的斯坦福奖学金学生。 当一排学生向他发问时，一个叫巴雅的学生站到一边，只是听。 她等到其他人都吃完之后才打开门
他告诉她每个月都要用她学到的关于AI的东西给他发电子邮件。 这是对后续的考验：“每个人都可以出去好好交谈。 但是，他们是否要信守承诺？”
她从未错过一个，在思科实习，重新设计了有经验的工作人员未能破解的“东西”。
称表示，“我们把她带进来，以便她能真正教我们人民如何完全不同的想法。” 现在他想招募她
Patel并不是唯一一个投注于Gen Z-OpenAI投资者Josh Kushner和Will.i.
Patel并不是唯一将Gen Z缺乏经验视为财富的老板。
Thrive Capital的创始人Josh Kushner告诉Fortune，他特别喜欢雇用有不到四年工业经验的人。
当他26岁时，风险投资公司发布面临压力，要求他引进更老，更老练的聘请。 但是，正如他所说的那样，“任何有才华的人永远不会想和一个26岁的孩子一起工作。” 因此，他招募了“我们所认识的最聪明的人”。
赌注还清了：他的公司对初创企业进行了价值数十亿的早期投资，包括OpenAI，目前以1.25万亿美元估值，正在筹集高达300亿美元。
这些天，库什纳可以轻松地雇佣那些有光泽的简历的行业老兵，但他还是宁愿“找到那个年轻饥饿的人 ”。
Alon Chen, Tastewise的创始人兼首席执行官——一个由百事公司，雀巢公司和火星公司信任的基因化AI平台——也积极寻找零经验的Gen Zers.
“我在雇用初级职员，他们几乎像AI本地人，我看见一些来自年轻一代的最好想法
Will.i.am也得出了类似的结论。 格莱美获奖的黑眼豌豆前卫可能最知名，他支持Tesla、OpenAI和Pinterest
为什么？他认为接下来的重大技术突破将来自于麻省理工和斯坦福的年轻创新者。 Will. “所以你想为此而奋斗。 这是我唯一关注的问题。
而帕特尔告诉"财富"，雇用Gen Z的趋势只会继续下去，这要归功于AI.
“我们持续加速的唯一办法就是确保我们周围的人具有广泛的经验，” “我的团队中有三分之一经验丰富、规模化的操作员了解思科引擎是如何工作的。 第三个是来自市场的系统思考者，他们带来了外部视角。 最后的第三个是创业创始人、首席执行官和工程师，他们都是在创始人模式下运作的AI-native。”
“除了这些团体之外，这就是创造魔法的原因。
本文由 AI图鉴自动抓取并翻译，版权归原作者所有；如需查看原文请点下方链接。
Gen Z can’t catch a break. Entry-level jobs are vanishing; some 40% of bosses say they plan to hire fewer grads because AI can do the job cheaper, and young workers are routinely slammed for showing up late and refusing to put in overtime for free. Cisco’s president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel isn’t buying it—he’s just handed one of the company’s biggest jobs to a 27-year-old he found hidden in the org chart “five levels” below him.
“I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.”
The “him” is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, or “Paddy,” as Patel affectionately calls him. He joined Cisco in 2025 after the $429 billion tech giant acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup Krishnamurthy cofounded in 2023. And despite coming in as a former founder with CEO experience, he was, in Patel’s words, “buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic.”
That changed when Patel dropped into Cisco’s San Francisco office, and the pair got talking. Krishnamurthy reckoned he could rewrite Cisco’s legacy code with a two-person team. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his own team weren’t thinking that way.
So he has given himself four weeks to prove it, with the final goal of refactoring 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months.
Now, he’s on the hunt for more Paddys: young hires who will “challenge the system and the status quo,” or, as he puts it, be “an energizer bunny that just goes out and kind of revs everyone up.”
Cisco’s president says Gen Z should be teaching his veterans, not doing data entry—and he’s fine with the tension that causes
At most companies, only someone with decades of experience under their belt would be trusted with a project this size. Patel thinks that’s a problem.
“If you don’t hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?” he said.
Seasoned staff can still come up with new ideas, Patel added. What they can’t do is ask the questions that only someone with no experience would think to ask.
And getting the two to get along isn’t always smooth. Patel admits that putting a Gen Zer in a room with people who’ve been at Cisco for decades can create friction—but he says that’s the point.
“Tension is good,” he said. “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.”
“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,” he added. “And so, in order to go out and achieve those unreasonable goals, think outside of the box.”
And he’s not just pushing senior staff to take notes from twentysomethings. He said that he treats every intern as “kind of a reverse mentor,” and even does talks at colleges to find students who are “hungry.”
His latest Gen Z bet came out of one of those talks, to 17- and 18-year-old Stanford scholarship students. While a line of students fired questions at him, one, Baya, stood off to the side, just listening. She waited until everyone else had finished before she opened up.
He told her to email him every month with what she’d learned about AI. It was a test of follow-through: “Everyone can go out and have one good conversation. But are they going to stick with their commitments?”
She never missed one, landed an internship at Cisco, and redesigned “something” that experienced staff hadn’t been able to crack.
“I didn’t bring her in so that she can do grunt work and do data entry,” he said. “We brought her in so that she could actually teach our people how to think completely differently.” Now he wants to recruit her.
Patel isn’t the only one betting on Gen Z—OpenAI investor Josh Kushner and Will.i.am are hunting for young, hungry talent
Patel isn’t the only boss who sees Gen Z’s lack of experience as an asset.
Thrive Capital’s founder Josh Kushner told Fortune he specifically likes to hire people with less than four years of industry experience.
When he launched the venture capital firm at just 26, he faced pressure to bring in older, more seasoned hires. But, as he put it, “anyone who has experience that is talented will never want to work with a 26-year-old.” So, instead, he recruited the “smartest people that we knew who were our ages.”
And that bet paid off: His firm made early investments in startups worth billions, including OpenAI, which is currently raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation.
These days, Kushner could easily hire industry veterans with glowing résumés—but he’d still rather “find that young, hungry person.”
Alon Chen, founder and CEO of Tastewise—a generative AI platform trusted by PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Mars—is also actively looking for Gen Zers with zero experience.
“I’m hiring entry-level because they have no boundaries or limitations in how they think about the world,” Chen told Fortune. “They’re almost like AI natives themselves, having been born and raised in this new realm of opportunities. And I see some of the best ideas coming from the younger generation that have not yet been in the job market.”
And Will.i.am has reached a similar conclusion. The Grammy-winning Black Eyed Peas frontman might be best known for his chart-topping hits, but behind the scenes, he’s a serious investor too. He backed Tesla, OpenAI, and Pinterest before they became household names—and now, he’s betting on Gen Z for his next investment.
Why? He believes the next big tech breakthroughs will come from young innovators at MIT and Stanford. “They’re young kids, and they’re native to this,” Will.i.am told Fortune. “So you want to hunt for that. That’s the only thing I’m focused on.”
And Patel told Fortune that the trend toward hiring Gen Z will only continue, thanks to AI.
“The only way for us to keep accelerating is to make sure we’re surrounded by people with a broad range of experience,” he said. “Roughly one-third of my team is experienced, scaled operators who understand how the Cisco engine works. The second third are systems thinkers from the market who bring the outside-in perspective. And the final third is made of entrepreneurial founders, CEOs, and engineers who are AI-native who 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.”
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Atlas. All rights belong to the original author.