In operations management, time is the scarcest resource. For Elena Chopyak, manually compiling Google News alerts into client digests consumed over an hour of her workday—every single day. 

At 5 days a week and 52 weeks in a year, this task took 260+ hours annually, or roughly 6.5 weeks of full-time work dedicated to a repetitive task.

Everything changed for Elena after she attended our "AI for Operations Leaders" webinar.

Automating a manual process

"I used to go through Google News manually looking for new articles on keyword alerts for our clients, then copy and paste all this information in the right format into a Google doc. This could take an hour or more every day," Elena explains.

Like many operations professionals, Elena had no formal coding background. Previous attempts to learn programming left her feeling discouraged. "It seemed like a completely foreign language that I was probably never going to pick up," she recalls.

Yet within just a few hours of applying the "vibe coding" techniques we demonstrated in our webinar, Elena built a fully functional Google News scraper that:

- Automatically searches for specific topics

- Scrapes relevant news articles from Google

- Formats them with article names, links, news outlets, and publish dates

- Creates a summary table of contents

- Populates everything directly into a Google Doc

The "Aha!" moment

For Elena, seeing her creation work for the first time was transformative. "My big 'aha!' moment was when I hit enter and I actually saw news articles populating in the Google document. I thought, 'wow, I copied and pasted some code, and now all of this stuff is just showing up.'"

This success story highlights a critical shift happening in operations: non-technical professionals are now capable of building custom workflow solutions that previously would have required dedicated engineering resources or expensive software subscriptions.

Tips for building your own custom AI solutions

What made this possible for someone with virtually no coding experience? Elena credits several factors:

1. Have a real problem to solve: "It really helps to have a real-life problem that you want to solve because there is an imperative to make it work. I wanted to save an hour a day."

2. Collaborate with AI, and treat it as a patient tutor: "Treat ChatGPT like a human tutor. Saying, 'I don't understand what you're telling me, take me a few steps backwards' helped."

3. Start with the right expert guidance: Elena recounted to our founder, "To hear you, a software engineer, tell me, you can do this, you weren't gatekeeping. What I really love about your approach is how you don't gatekeep coding at all. It’s been helpful to chat through what’s possible and what I can do on my own, as well as the situations where I should, instead, pay for a software, or pay someone to do it for me.” As a quick example to illustrate her point, you wouldn’t want to DIY your own self-driving car software.

The most impressive part is that Elena's entire solution required no expensive software subscriptions and zero lines of original code. 

She simply took our guidance on identifying the right solution to build. And then, she applied our AI usage framework to assemble building blocks in the right way.

The real ROI: What Elena is doing with her reclaimed time

With over 260 hours of her year suddenly freed up, Elena isn't just celebrating the time savings. She's reinvesting it. "I have more time to work on other things and to learn. I'm now dabbling in SQL and Tableau."

The true promise of AI for operations leaders is transformation. By eliminating low-value manual tasks, operations leaders can focus on developing higher-order skills that create exponentially more value for their organizations.

Want to build your own custom AI solution?

If Elena's story resonates with your own operational challenges, we invite you to join our upcoming webinar, "Using AI in Non-Technical Roles." 

In just 30 minutes, we’ll walk you through the exact process Elena used to build her custom solution—no coding experience required.

The webinar is completely free and has already helped dozens of operations professionals like Elena reclaim hundreds of hours of valuable time.

Register for the free webinar here.

Or, if you're ready to commit to upskilling yourself and your team in AI, book some time to chat through what a 1:1 AI enablement coaching package could look like.