"Second brain" instead of a separate skill. How AI is changing traditional IT professions

The name is the same, the requirements are different.

«Almost every position has changed its profile,» says Myroslava Kononchuk, Talent Acquisition Specialist at HOLYWATER TECH. She cites engineering vacancies as an example: until recently, it was enough to find a strong Full-Stack developer. Now the employer expects the candidate to have already integrated AI into their own workflow — without this, it is increasingly difficult to work at the same pace as the team.

According to Myroslava, finding such candidates is even easier today than a year ago. At the beginning of the generative AI boom, the corresponding skills distinguished a specialist from others. Now they are gradually becoming the market norm.

The company is less interested in whether a person uses artificial intelligence. Much more important is how they do it: using AI as a quick search for answers or as a full-fledged assistant that helps analyze information, generate decisions, and take on repetitive work.

«We are looking for people who are focused not just on completing a task, but on finding a solution. It’s a question of thinking, not of owning individual tools,» explains Myroslava.

This approach at HOLYWATER TECH is called second brain. AI is becoming not a separate skill on a resume, but another participant in the workflow. This is also noticeable in the company’s open roles — from marketing and User Acquisition to engineering and analytics. In most cases, candidates are not expected to know a specific AI service, but to be willing to work with AI and automate their own process with its help: analyze faster, test hypotheses, automate repetitive tasks and check the result.

The stories of three HOLYWATER TECH specialists show how this changes daily work.

User Acquisition: from manual analysis to «orchestration» of tools

Kateryna Horska heads the User Acquisition department of the My Drama product. She moved to the product company from a digital agency, where she worked with brand advertising for Ukrainian companies. This required a change in professional optics. In brand advertising, the main indicators were reach and recognition. In product marketing, decisions are built around conversions, purchases, LTV, and unit economics.

To immerse herself in a new field, Kateryna communicated with User Acquisition managers from product companies, participated in a marketing hackathon, and independently dealt with product metrics.

After one of the technical interviews, she realized that the theoretical basis was not enough to work with real cases. Instead of another course, she asked familiar experts to analyze practical situations with her, and used ChatGPT to simulate technical interviews.

Kateryna joined HOLYWATER TECH when the User Acquisition team consisted of only two people. In less than a year and a half, she became its lead.

Today, AI is no longer a learning tool for her, but a full-fledged part of her work.

The team uses Claude to analyze audiences, select creatives, and find patterns in the data that are easy to miss during traditional analysis.

Previously, a significant part of the specialist’s time was spent on independent search and processing of information. Now AI helps to pass this stage faster. At the same time, the person’s responsibility does not decrease: it is he who must ask the right question, check the result and understand which solution makes sense for the business.

Kateryna describes her role as a movement towards the «orchestration» of instruments.

Creative marketing: from completing tasks to asking the right questions

A similar change is observed by Yulia Samburska, Creative Marketing Lead at My Drama. Her professional base was formed through working with content: texts, creative concepts, technical tasks, and evaluating advertising materials from the point of view of business results. Courses on Coursera and Superludi helped to systematize knowledge, but practical experience became decisive.

Today, her role encompasses creative product strategy, sprint planning, ad analysis, competitor research, series launches, hiring, onboarding, and team building. It is in creative marketing, according to Yulia, that AI has most quickly taken over repetitive work. It helps create first drafts of creatives, refine scripts, adapt materials for different audiences, and compile reports. A report that used to take an hour to prepare can now be generated in minutes.

«When I see a task that is regularly repeated, the first question is whether it can be automated. If the answer is yes, we try to do it,» explains Yulia. Because of this, the role of the marketer itself is changing. Less time is spent on mechanical execution, more on setting the task, choosing a direction and evaluating the result. At the same time, the speed of generation does not replace professional experience. AI can offer dozens of options, but it will not independently determine which of them corresponds to the product, audience and business goals.

According to her, routine is being automated not to work less, but to free up time for tasks that cannot yet be delegated to algorithms.

Engineering: AI won’t save an outdated process

AI is not just affecting creative teams. Head of Engineering HOLYWATER TECH Xiong Le joined the company as an iOS developer. As the business scaled, his role transformed from managing a small team to being responsible for technical strategy, developing the engineering organization, and interacting with product teams.

Today, AI helps engineers write code faster, conduct code reviews, work with documentation, analyze information, and find technical solution options. However, the ultimate responsibility remains with humans.

«The claim that AI will take away jobs from IT workers seems overly simplistic to me. It does indeed gradually take away routine and repetitive tasks, but at the same time it empowers those who know how to ask the right questions, critically evaluate answers, and understand context,» the specialist assures.

In engineering, it’s especially evident that AI isn’t just a simple addition to an existing process. Approaches that worked a month ago can quickly become obsolete. As a result, teams are forced to rethink not just their toolkit, but their entire workflow.

Second brain as a new work model

Marketers, engineers, and recruiters describe different tasks, but they talk about the same change. AI is gradually ceasing to be a separate competency that can be added to a resume alongside Python, Figma, or advertising cabinets. It is being built into the workflow in the same way that Google search, instant messaging, and version control systems were once built into it.

Therefore, the main advantage is not the mastery of AI tools. It is more important to be able to rebuild work around them: determine what is worth automating, ask precise questions, verify answers, and take on decisions that require an understanding of the context.

For employers, this changes the requirements for candidates. For specialists, it means the need to learn faster than job titles and their formal descriptions are updated.

Professions do not disappear overnight. First, individual tasks disappear, then processes change, and with them the value that a person should create. This is what HOLYWATER TECH calls second brain: not another service in the work set, but a new model of interaction between a specialist and technology.