Vihang Chheda

My first piece was on the EU-India FTA. I wanted to understand why the deal was happening at all, not just what was in it. That led to weeks of reading treaty texts, trade data, and geopolitical strategy. The answer turned out to have very little to do with trade.

The process was entirely manual: scheduling meetings across franchises, getting approvals, tracking attendance, generating certificates. Each step involved someone copying data from one place to another. I built a system that handles the full pipeline, with a natural language chatbot interface so franchise managers don't need to learn new software. They just type what they need.

It saves about 8 hours of manual work every week and is still in daily use across all franchises.

This was early in the ChatGPT wave. Most people were still figuring out whether AI tools were a gimmick or something real. I thought the best way to answer that was to just show people how to use them. So I wrote a practical guide: how to get useful output, how to think about prompts, how to integrate AI into everyday work. 141 pages.

It was recognized by the Maharashtra Business Training Board. Separately, it was presented to Union Minister Piyush Goyal. The book I wrote to help friends make sense of ChatGPT ended up in front of India's Minister for Commerce and Industry. That part was not planned.

The idea was pure accountability. You sit down to study, you press start. The dashboard shows both players in real time: who's working, who's idle, and exactly how many hours each person has put in. Hours tick up live. At the end of the week, whoever logged more hours wins the point. That's it.

I also built a simple Android app that pulled phone screen time data into the dashboard. So if you said you were studying but your screen time told a different story, that was visible too. Accountability through mild shame. It worked better than any productivity advice I've ever read.