Transforming AI into jobs may be a trend, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
As AI-related jobs continue to grow and companies invest heavily in upskilling, more workers are adding “AI” to their job titles.
To find out how you can do that, Business Insider spoke to four Google employees who have transitioned to AI teams. Each took a different path, but all took about a year to develop the skills needed to land their new roles, and some took several years to transition.
From participating in employee hackathons to becoming AI content creators, four employees share how they've changed.
Emric Donadi
Emrick Donadei is a software engineer who studies safety in AI and machine learning. Emric Donadi
Emrick Donaday said he didn't feel qualified to pivot to the AI team until he attended Google's seven-day employee hackathon in 2024. The 32-year-old engineer said that although he didn't create a revolutionary product, it gave him hands-on experience with the tool and gave him something tangible to use to start conversations with internal teams.
About 10 months after his first hackathon, he said he landed a new role.
The hackathon was the catalyst for his transition, but his work didn't stop there. Google employees continued to experiment with the tool outside of the hackathon. I also created a podcast on AI development and watched Andrej Karpathy's YouTube videos to understand machine learning concepts and everything related to the LLM.
After finding his new role, Donaday said he participated in another hackathon in 2025, which opened up more opportunities. He had the opportunity to transition into AI research and began working part-time on open source committees and AI research teams, and published technical disclosures at Google as a follow-up to his research.
maitri mangal
Maitri Mangal has joined Google's Workspace AI team. maitri mangal
Maitri Mangal, 27, worked as a traditional software engineer before moving to the AI team. During the nearly year she spent preparing for Pivot, Mangal spent about two hours a day developing her skills, and she said she still spends hours each week learning.
She said creating social media content is a way to reinforce what she learned through Google's in-house training and other online courses.
“It really changed everything for me,” Mangal said of content creation.
She said seeing her content help others motivated her to continue learning about technology and making videos. Although she has now changed jobs, she still spends about an hour a day learning new information, whether it's through in-house training for her job or watching YouTube courses to prepare her content.
Rahul Kasanagotu
Rahul Kasanagotu is currently working as a customer engineer at Google, specializing in AI and machine learning. Rahul Kasanagotu
Rahul Kasanagotu, 32, spent two and a half years transitioning into an AI role at a large tech company. She said her parental leave allowed her to start reading about AI.
In addition to having read 11 books on the subject, Kasanagottu said: Deep learning specialized course I watched it after learning about it from Andrew Ng. 3 blue 1 brown video On YouTube.
Like Donna Day, Kasanagottu also said that solo projects were an important part of his career transition. He said it's difficult to convince hiring managers that you can do the job without showing demos and practical projects. Kasanagottu said the books he read usually didn't come with assignments, but the courses included plenty of practical exercises.
Milica Cvetković
Milica Cvetkovic took a different path than the other three Googlers who pivoted to the AI team within the company. After completing graduate school and doing research in machine learning, she took a job in AI consulting at a tech giant about three years ago.
After earning her master's degree in statistics, she worked as a machine learning engineer at a Madison-based startup while simultaneously teaching machine learning bootcamps and college-level courses.
“Having the skill to speak in a non-technical way is probably the most valuable skill I brought,” Cvetkovic said.
Her move to Google's AI team was less a deliberate change of direction and more the result of the right opportunity that fit her background and interests. She said she realized she didn't want to code anymore, and that's when she found a consulting job at Google.
Cvetkovic said she couldn't point to a single experience that led her to take this job. Rather, she compared her career journey to training for a marathon. The marathon is “a celebration of all the hard work I've put in,” she says.
“That was literally my application. It was a great fit,” Cvetkovic said.
Have you moved into an AI role? We’d love to hear from you. Contact the reporter via email: aaltchek@insider.com or via the secure messaging app Signal aalt.19.
