Two stories landed in the same week, and they seem to argue with each other.
In one, a Cisco president hands a 27-year-old unlimited AI tokens and tells him to "go nuts" on the company's legacy code. In the other, IIT Madras warns that AI is quietly removing the bottom rungs of India's career ladder.
So which is it? Is AI breaking the ladder, or letting juniors skip it?
My answer: both stories are true, and that is the point. The ladder is not gone. It has been rewired. And the new first rung is proof that you can create leverage with AI.
The Cisco story
Fortune reported on 30 October that Jeetu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer, found Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, "Paddy", working "five levels" below him and "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic."
Krishnamurthy said he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code with a two-person team. Patel says even the most AI-forward people on his team weren't thinking that way. So Patel gave him unlimited tokens. "I'm like, you can go, you can go nuts," he told Fortune. The stated goal: refactor 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months.
Patel's reasoning is the interesting part: "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?"
One honest caveat. Paddy is not a typical fresher. He co-founded EzDubs, a real-time translation startup that Cisco acquired, and came in with CEO experience. This is a story about a young person with unusual leverage, not proof that every graduate will be handed the codebase.
The IIT Madras warning
Now the other side. IIT Madras's Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) published a white paper, How AI Is Reconfiguring Work in India. Its line on juniors is blunt: "The entry-level career pipeline is especially at risk."
The paper explains why. Junior roles have historically worked as an apprenticeship. Password resets, basic contract review and boilerplate code are low-value tasks individually, but together they teach the judgment you need later. If AI automates exactly those tasks, where does senior judgment come from?
It also names the "missing middle": overall job numbers can hide a situation where junior roles disappear "even as demand for senior workers holds or grows." Senior software engineering is its example.
This matters more in India than almost anywhere. The paper notes that our IT, BPO, finance and professional-services sectors have historically absorbed very large annual cohorts of entry-level graduates. That is the ladder millions of families have bet on.
Why I say "rewired", not "broken"
Read the CeRAI paper closely and it does not say the ladder must collapse. It sketches a redesigned one. For BPO, an illustrative path runs from Tier-1 voice agent to escalation specialist, quality evaluator, AI conversation designer and operations supervisor. Each step still builds senior judgment, but the junior practises on AI output instead of raw customer calls.
That is the same move Cisco made, at a different scale. The junior's job is no longer to do the routine task. It is to direct, check and correct the system that does it.
But the paper is also honest about the risk. Whether firms will redesign career paths "rather than simply hiring fewer juniors and hoping senior judgment appears from elsewhere" is, in its words, an open question. It also admits much of its evidence is illustrative or from vendors, and that India lacks rigorous research here.
So I'm not telling you everything will be fine. I'm telling you which side of that open question you can influence.
What I'd tell a fresher or early-career professional
1. Don't wait to be trained. If your employer hasn't redesigned your role, nobody is coming to do it for you this quarter. Learn the tools on your own time.
2. Show leverage, not usage. "I use ChatGPT" is not a signal. "I cleaned up 40 test cases with AI, caught three wrong outputs, and documented why" is. Paddy didn't get unlimited tokens for using AI. He got them for proposing what two people could do with it.
3. Practise being the reviewer. CeRAI's redesigned junior roles centre on checking AI outputs, resolving escalations and evaluating system performance. Get good at spotting where AI is wrong. That is the judgment the old grunt work used to build.
4. Make your work visible. Patel found Paddy only because they talked. Write short notes on what you built and what you learned. Share them with your manager.
What I'd tell managers
If you stop hiring juniors, you are betting senior judgment will appear from somewhere. CeRAI calls that hope out directly. Redesign the first rung instead: give juniors AI-assisted work with real review responsibility, and reward the ones who show leverage, not the ones who log the most hours.
The bottom line
AI is removing the old first rung. It is not removing the ladder. The juniors who will climb fastest are the ones who stop waiting for permission and start showing what they can do with AI.
If you want structured practice building that kind of AI leverage, see our programs at The Arthi AI Collective: https://thearthiaicollective.com/programs
Sources
- Fortune, "Cisco chief found a 27-year-old ex-founder 'buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic'", 30 Oct 2026
- NDTV, "Future Of Software Engineering? Cisco Boss Hires Gen Z Employee To Rewrite Company's Entire 'Legacy' Code"
- IIT Madras CeRAI, How AI Is Reconfiguring Work in India (white paper)
- The Indian Express, "AI isn't killing entry-level jobs, it's breaking the ladder to senior roles: IIT Madras study", 27 Oct 2026
- The Hindu, "AI's costs fall unevenly across workers; IIT Madras paper flags surveillance, work stress", 26 Oct 2026