712 - The Boring Work Is Where AI Pays First with Dima Negodiuk
Why you should listen
- Dima Negodiuk had never written a line of code when he arrived in the US after losing almost everything. He now runs six businesses on AI agents and spends about two hours each morning approving or denying what they have prepared.
- Learn Dima's audit-first approach: a free light audit to find the first fix, then a heavy audit that sits inside the team's daily workflow and turns into a step-by-step build plan the owner can pick from. In one audit it uncovered roughly $100,000 in missed, unpaid invoices.
- Get his practical safety rules for AI agents: set a token budget before you build, add a second model or a plain calculator to check the first, and never let an agent touch money without a human pressing approve.
Your clients keep asking about AI agents, and you are still not sure whether to build them yourself or stay in your Zoho, HubSpot, or NetSuite lane and bring someone in. In this episode, I talk with Dima Negodiuk, an AI automation consultant who rebuilt his life as an entrepreneur after leaving Ukraine and now runs six businesses with agents doing most of the work. He started out not knowing what a terminal was, sending screenshots to ChatGPT one step at a time, and that beginner's lens is exactly why his view cuts through the hype. We get into what an agent really is, where they go wrong, and the honest trade-off between your time and someone else's practice. If you have been feeling like the AI train already left without you, this conversation will change how you see your next move.
Key Highlights
- Fix the Most Boring Task First: Dima's go-to-market in one line: pick the most boring job in the business, put AI on top, give it seven days, check, and repeat.
- Agents Never Touch Money: Why every payment, invoice, and spending decision in his six businesses waits for a human approve button, no matter how good the agents get.
- Two Models Can Be Wrong Together: The story of Claude and Codex agreeing that 2 plus 2 equals 5, and why a simple coded calculator now checks their numbers.
- The Token Bill Nobody Budgets For: How new models can burn through money overnight, and the simple maths for deciding what one saved hour is worth before you build.
- The Hedgehog or the Fox: When to build AI on top of the platform yourself versus sticking to your lane and partnering with a specialist, framed around the time you have and how fast competitors are moving.
About Dima Negodiuk
Dima (Dmytro) Negodiuk is the founder of Negodiuk AI Consulting in Brooklyn, New York, where he builds AI systems inside small and mid-size businesses, typically companies doing $1M to $10M in revenue. Before AI, he spent more than a decade as an entrepreneur in Ukraine, co-building a distribution business that supplied retail chains across eight countries. When the war forced his family to leave Kyiv in 2022, he arrived in New York having lost most of what he had built, with no coding background. Rather than rehire the sales, marketing, and support departments he once ran, he taught himself to build AI agents, starting with his own Amazon e-commerce brand. He now runs six businesses, from paint to his AI consultancy, without a traditional team, and helps owners hand their most repetitive work to AI. Dima offers free guidance on LinkedIn to anyone starting out with AI.
Resources and Links
- negodiuk.ai
- Dima Negodiuk on LinkedIn
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