Why Kazakhstan's IT sector should stop playing at being Silicon Valley and start building its own

Askar Aytuaev, Tech Reviewer, Founder of Devs.kz

While we discuss the latest frameworks and argue about the correctness of conducting retrospectives, the global market is sending us unmistakable signals. The news from recent weeks is a cold shower: layoffs at Amazon, optimization at Intel and Microsoft, and even the relocation of decision-making centers for major telecom giants from our region to Dubai.

The era of "infinite hiring" and bloated staffs is over. And for Kazakhstan, this reveals an unexpected but harsh truth: the cargo cult of Silicon Valley no longer works.

The Trap of "Theater of Innovation"

Marty Cagan, in his book TRANSFORM, describes a phenomenon that we observe everywhere in Central Asia. Companies try to copy the rituals of successful San Francisco startups — Agile, OKRs, endless meetings — but miss the essence.

In Silicon Valley, a startup can afford to spend a year searching for Product-Market Fit, burning through venture capital. Kazakhstan does not have such luxury: we do not have "long" money, and we need revenue "here and now."

However, instead of accelerating development, we created a layer of "sticker managers," dividing the process into those who come up with ideas and those who code. By 2025, this chain became too long and expensive.

Digital Sovereignty: Where is Our Booking?

While we build perfect processes for outsourcing, our own market remains "digital virgin land."

Look at countries comparable to us in terms of digital economy development. They do not wait for global players; they create their own alternatives:

Turkey: the Otelz platform successfully competes with global booking giants.

Poland: the Nocowanie.pl service holds a huge share of the domestic market.

Germany: the local player Kurzurlaub.de thrives in the short-travel niche.

And what about Kazakhstan? In the TravelTech niche — silence. We handed the market to global platforms without a fight.

The only notable fighter in the adjacent taxi niche is Aparu.kz. And it is not just about patriotism. A local product always understands the context better. Global navigators might lead you into a dead end in the middle of Konaev Street simply because their maps are updated from space, not from the ground. We need our own solutions, but there is no one to build them while the best minds are busy supporting someone else's infrastructure.

We have hardware and brains. What is missing?

The paradox: technically, Kazakhstan is better prepared for a leap than many others.

1. We are Power Users of artificial intelligence. According to the Anthropic index, Kazakhstan has an AI usage index of 0.41x, with developers being the main category of users. We already use Gemini, Claude, and GPT for writing code.
2. We have "heavy artillery." The Alem Cloud supercomputer from Nitec ranks 86th in the global Top 500. This is 20 PFlop/s of power available for training and fine-tuning models.

We have learned to code quickly, and we have the hardware to compute. But we often fall into the trap of "wrappers" — simply reselling someone else's API, sometimes even forgetting to clean the documentation of traces from deepseek.py.

We need to move from consuming technologies to engineering products.

The New Hero: AI Product Engineer

The labor market is changing. Pure "managers" and pure "coders working from specs" are becoming vulnerable. The future belongs to hybrids.

In response to this challenge, at Devs.kz, we are introducing the concept of an AI Product Engineer. And soon we will launch a series of meetups on this topic.

This is not about how to write prompts. It is about returning to the roots of engineering, enhanced by the power of LLMs.

Product Skill: the ability to find market pain points. Why does Kazakhstan need its own Booking, and not yet another marketplace?

Engineering Skill: the ability to build an MVP with your own hands over the weekend, using RAG, agents, and local models on our hardware, without waiting to hire a team of five people.

This is the evolution of the profession. AI gives one person the opportunity to do the work of an entire department as it existed in 2020.

Call to Action

Stop copying San Francisco. We have a different climate, a different economy, and different opportunities. A real vacancy is now open — to create a "Digital Kazakhstan" not in government reports, but in users' smartphones.

All the tools are already on the table: computing power is working in the Alem Cloud servers. It is time to stop managing processes and start building real products.