Replacing four contractors with one AI-powered workflow

The status quo

The CMS rebuild wasn't on the roadmap. Not because nobody wanted it. Because there were bigger priorities. The platform was monolithic, manual, and understood. Content managers had a process. It was slow. It worked.

Every lesson was built by hand. Open the print PDF, create a page in the CMS, copy content, style it as HTML, QA it, move on. 1.6 hours per lesson. 4.8 weeks for a full Teacher Edition. The limitations were known. The workarounds were established. The organization had planned around it.

The deadline

When eight grades of new curriculum needed to go online, three of them within six weeks for an external review deadline, the natural move was to scale the existing process. More people, same workflow. Four contractors, a few months, real cost. It would have worked.

The opportunity

As AVP of Product Design and Management, I saw the deadline as an opportunity to rethink the workflow rather than just staff up for it. I proposed a different approach. Smaller and faster.

The content in the print PDFs already had structure. Patterns repeated across lessons. The digital content model was defined. Every manual step in the workflow was a human performing a predictable transformation.

The pipeline

I designed and built a pipeline in weeks, not months. AI-powered OCR extracts and classifies content from PDFs. A transformation layer generates structured HTML mapped to the content model. Humans review and approve. CSVs upload to the database directly. The CMS stays exactly as it is. Nothing was rebuilt. The bottleneck was routed around.

AI wasn't a feature added at the end. It was how I designed, prototyped, built, and tested the solution.

The Bulk Lesson Upload tool — CSVs upload directly to the database, bypassing the manual CMS.

The outcome

1.6 hours became 20 minutes. Five lessons a day became 24. Four contractors became one content manager. The deadline was met with room to spare.

The next iteration automates further, collapsing extraction and formatting into one step. The manual process is becoming optional.

The CMS and digital curriculum rebuild is underway. The pipeline will evolve with it. But the curriculum is online now, the deadline was met, and the team is focused on higher-value work.