When His Son Was Diagnosed With Cancer During Wartime, This Father Was Forced To Leave His Country And Find A New Way To Make A Living. AI Made That Possible.
By Elaine Pofeldt, Senior Contributor.
Jun 20, 2026, 03:45pm EDT
It was February 21, 2022. Dima Negodiuk and his wife Ira got a call from the surgeon who was supposed to perform surgery on their then-two-year-old Mark to remove his brain tumor. The bad news was Russia had invaded Ukraine, where they lived, and the hospital had been evacuated. Their surgeon in Kyiv could no longer perform the surgery.
Anticipating that war might break out, the couple had already purchased tickets to fly to Istanbul on February 23 to stay in a friend’s apartment. But now their son’s doctor told them it was too dangerous for their son to make the trip. They needed to have the surgery done in Ukraine immediately.
There was only one doctor left in the country who could do it, neurosurgeon Volodymyr Smolanka, acting rector of Uzhhorod National University. His practice was in Uzhhorod, a city in Western Ukraine, near the Hungarian border.
Grabbing the keys to the BMW a friend had left them when he had fled Ukraine for Europe, Negodiuk and his wife, Ira, began the harrowing drive from Kyiv. “My child was screaming from the headache,” he recalls.
Normally a six-hour trip, the journey took more than a day. Negodiuk didn’t know it then, but the journey would not only change the course of his son’s life but also his own, pushing him into a brand-new career thousands of miles from home.
However, as Negodiuk drove through the war-torn streets, work was far from his mind. Many roads were closed, with tanks rolling through. Negodiuk sometimes had to drive off the road into fields to keep moving ahead. There were soldiers everywhere. “You don’t know if it’s your guys—or if it’s bad guys,” he recalls. “It was the hardest road in my life.”
When Dima and Ira Negodiuk's son, Mark, needed life-saving brain surgery, they had to leave Ukraine to come to the U.S. Creating five AI powered business esallowed him to support his family.
Negodiuk.ai
Life-saving surgery
Immediately after they arrived, Dr. Smolanka performed the surgery that saved Mark’s life, removing an 8 cm tumor. The neurosurgeon put it the tumor in a small transport can and handed it to Negodiuk so the couple could get a biopsy. “My hands were shaking,” Negodiuk recalls. “All the laboratories were closed in Ukraine.”
Negodiuk started searching online for volunteers who could help them and found one who agreed to transport the tumor to Germany and another to Italy. Two separate laboratories in those countries did the biopsy for free. The couple learned the tumor was an ependymoma, a rare type that begins in the brain or spinal cord.
When doctors determined that Mark needed advanced care, many supporters rallied around them. The Koenig Family Foundation, which the family learned about through a friend of a friend whose child had been treated for cancer, helped them get to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City, providing plane tickets and a hotel room in New York City. The family ended up spending about four months living in the Ronald McDonald House, which provides families with a place to stay while their children get cancer treatment. Volunteers raised $50,640 in a GoFundMe campaign in October 2022, exceeding the $25,000 goal. Then a friend who was renovating a building in Brooklyn gave the family free rent for several months, until Negodiuk could start earning a living.
Birthing a brand-new career—in AI
There was one big problem: Negodiuk needed a sustainable way to make a living. In Ukraine, he’d built an ecommerce business around mobile phone accessories, inspired by a small kiosk he saw during a trip to the U.S. at age 19 as an exchange student. His online store took off and grew into a distributor for about 10 brands through retail and B2B distribution.
However, he needed income immediately. As longtime solopreneur, he wasn’t likely to find an employer in the U.S. who was willing to sponsor a work visa for him for a year.
Meanwhile, their other sources of income dried up. After the war started, his wife, Ira, had continued running her Kyiv-based bakery, Lviv Croissants, relying on a trusted manager and two employees. However, it was bombed in the summer of 2022, and when the electricity stopped working regularly, they discovered they could not run their refrigerator and freezer on a gas generator. Ira also ran a small photo business in a mall, relying on her mother to help her when she came to the U.S. Unfortunately, the mall was bombed three weeks ago in the early morning hours and destroyed by a missile, shuttering the business.
Luckily, as an e-commerce entrepreneur, Negodiuk had learned the value of automation. Intrigued by videos made by 19- and 20-year-old entrepreneurs who were creating websites with the Webflow template Klink and the video generator Veo 3.1, he began looking into AI tools like this. “They created this viral video without no product at all,” put it on Tik Tok, and got 5 million views,” he recalls. “They published it on Apple Store. First month: $40,000 in subscriptions.”
With that success story in mind, he began teaching himself how to use AI, relying on YouTube tutorials to guide him. He learned Claude Code (for vibe coding), n8n (to automate workflows), the Telegram API for information gathering, and other free and low-cost coding tools, such as TypeScript (for catching coding bugs) and Python (for programming).
“It’s unbelievable because six months ago, I didn't know anything about AI,” he says. “For six months, every day I learned something new.”
In doing so, he joined a fast-growing trend. Eighty-nine percent of small business owners report using AI for streamlining routine tasks including data analysis, marketing and communication, according to research published in April 2025 by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. Intuit, maker of the cloud-based accounting software QuickBooks, funded the study, which included a survey and interviews in focus groups.
Negodiuk’s self-taught skills have now allowed him to build a new career as a “fractional AI officer” for his customers. “I never write a line of code, never,” he says. “I am a guide who talks, builds, motivates, so I create strategy. I create business plans.”
Embracing the portfolio approach to business
As Mark gradually recovered--he will be entering second grade in the fall--Negodiuk developed five businesses powered by AI agents. They are in diverse niches: AI consulting, which occupies 90% of his time; crisis management for a logistics company; Mozabrik, which sells photo mosaic kits on Amazon; OD Granite Group (granite distribution, in which the AI powers a call center that reaches out to prospects to offer products), and Kompozit USA, a paint distribution firm (for a friend in Florida who emigrated from Ukraine).
The AI has helped with tasks such as creating a website, posting content and serving as a CRM for the granite distributor, owned by his father-in-law, who lives in the U.S. “It’s amazing that the AI staff gives you leads,” Negodiuk says. “I was skeptical about it, but it works.”
Negodiuk has also taken on some smaller clients, who pay retainers of about $500 a month. To give an example of how applies AI for them, the AI agent might hypothetically help a coffee cup maker by visiting the websites of companies selling coffee cups prior to Father’s Day and identify those that don’t have a Father’s Day cup for sale. The AI might identify sellers who could use such cups and send messages offering to provide stock.
Collectively, Negodiuk’s businesses bring in up to $20,000 per month in revenue, though that fluctuates, he says. Several venture capital firms have reached out expressing interest in the AI call center, he says. “You can create a project for an investor that will be interesting to put money in,” he says.
All told, Negodiuk spends about $600 a month on tokens for AI agents. He has no employees or contractors in the business. He runs all the businesses from a dashboard, which he checks for an hour in the morning.
What’s growing most quickly is his AI consultancy. He’s been working recently with clients who are doctors and dentists. “You can take data from them, create their own dashboard, and automate everything, like client outreach and payment workflows,” he says. “It’s an unbelievable period of life in which, without any IT experience, I’m creating such complicated products for my clients.”
Juggling AI agents
One challenge Negodiuk has faced is managing the complexity of his businesses—one that solopreneurs will need to address if they want to scale their use of AI. What he’s finding is it takes time to save time. Many of his AI prompts are 50 pages long, and he is the one who must write them. “As a solo entrepreneur, I think you can run a maximum of five companies per month,” he says.
Beyond that, what AI can’t replace in the business world is human connection. Despite the efficiencies he has brought to tasks like prospecting, there are some things he does the old-fashioned way, like getting to know clients.
“I like to talk with clients,” he says. “I like to know what they want. I want to know their pain and that is what AI cannot replace. I think in the future, it will be a huge, huge benefit if your customer support will be real people, not AI, because we're now on the first stage of all this kind of automatization. And in the future, people will want to pay more if they can talk with people, if they can talk with men or women.”
While his business is growing, Negodiuk and his family face a significant challenge ahead. Given events like the recent massive bombing of Kyiv, they are hesitant to return to Ukraine. The family had received temporary protected status in the summer of 2022 for 18 months and reapplied successfully. They have since applied to renew their protected status visa in the U.S. and don’t yet know the outcome.
“If the government does nothing, October 19 will be our last day in America,” he says. “There are not a lot of options. I am sole entrepreneur. I don’t have any kind of company that will hire me and pay $100,000 for a working visa for a year.”
Fortunately, Negodiuk knows how to run a variety of AI powered businesses. These businesses, which can be run from anywhere, may end up being the ticket to his family’s security in the future.
