Sarah and the AI Program

In Singapore, there was a girl named Sarah who studied at ACS International. She was in Grade 8, or Sec 2 as they call it there. Sarah was a very, very smart girl. She loved computers and used to do all sorts of things with them. She was really good in math and physics, but really lousy in Hindi. Her dad was an entrepreneur—that's somebody who started his own company—and her mom worked for a recruitment company.

Sarah used to eat in the school cafeteria. The school canteen had multiple food stalls, about six of them, and they served different types of food—burgers, pasta, roti paratha, fried rice, pizza, and more.

One day, Sarah noticed something that bothered her. After lunch was over during recess, all the stall owners were throwing away their food. Extra burgers, extra pasta, extra roti paratha—all of it being thrown in the trash.

She walked up to them and asked, "Why are you throwing this food away?"

The stall owners explained, "You know, whatever is spare we have to throw. We try to estimate how many students are going to eat every day. There are 500 students in the school, and about 50 to 60 come to our stalls each day, so we make food for them. But it's very difficult to be accurate about how many are going to come. And whatever is left, we have to throw because Singapore has very strict food regulations. You can't store the food, especially for children, because if it gets spoiled, it can upset their tummy."

Sarah saw that almost a big basket of food was being wasted. She thought, "This is really bad."

She came home and discussed it with her friends and her mom and dad. "So much food is being wasted," she said.

Her dad told her, "Basically, they don't know how many people are going to come and eat."

"Why can't they just put the food in the fridge and serve it the next day?" Sarah asked.

"That's against the food regulations anyway," her parents explained.

"So how do I solve this problem?" Sarah wondered. "So much food is being wasted, and in Singapore there are so many people who don't even get proper food."

Her dad suggested, "Maybe the problem is that they cannot predict accurately how much food is needed on any daily basis. And this is actually a problem which artificial intelligence—or AI—can solve. If you can get data on how much food they sold every day for the last two to three years, based on this, you can make a prediction model of how many plates they need to make on a particular day of the week or a particular day of the month. There must be some pattern to this, and artificial intelligence is actually very good at understanding patterns. If you can get this data and upload it to an AI program, you can actually quite easily make some predictions."

"Really?" Sarah said. "Okay, I'm going to speak to the principal."

So she went and spoke to the principal, a man called Master Gavin Ginge.

"Oh, that's a good idea," he said. "But what do you know about AI?"

"I don't know much about AI," Sarah admitted, "but I'll learn. AI is supposed to be very, very simple these days. You can just make some prompts and you can understand it."

"What do you need?" Master Ginge asked. This seemed like a good problem to solve.

"I just need the sales data of all these food stalls," Sarah said.

Master Ginge called all the food stall owners, and they agreed. They pulled out their registers. Because everybody basically paid with EasyLink there, they had data on how much was paid every day. They used to enter on the computer how many dishes they were selling—pasta, fried chicken, pizza, fried rice, and all that.

Sarah got all the data. She asked her dad, "What do I do now? I don't know anything about computer programs. How do I write one?"

Daddy said, "It's very simple. If you use any of these systems like Claude or Manus or anything, all you need to write is plain English."

"Okay, I'll try that," Sarah said.

So she went to Manus and said, "I have this problem. School food is being wasted. They cannot predict properly. What can I do?"

Manus said, "Can you give us the data?"

She got all the data in Excel sheets and uploaded them. Then Manus kept asking her questions.

"Okay. How many students are there in the school?"

"About 500 students," Sarah answered.

Manus also suggested, "Why don't you make some correlation? Correlation is a connection between things like the day of the week, time of the year. Maybe after Chinese New Year, people are not coming, or after vacation, they're ordering less or more."

So Manus, the AI program, looked at all the data from all the stalls. It analyzed what day it was, how much food was being sold, and then made a program. The program said that on a particular day—say, September 13th, 2026—you just need to put in the date, and it will give you a good prediction of how many food items are going to be sold from each particular stall.

Sarah made this program, and it took her only about one hour! All she was doing was writing English language prompts, putting in some data, and refining it a little bit.

After this was created, Manus created a new website where you could enter the date. Sarah gave it to all the stall owners.

The stall owners said, "We'll just try this first."

So they would put in the date, and the program would say, "Okay, today you will sell 47 dishes—22 pasta, 22 pizza," and so on.

To their surprise, that was much less than what they were going to prepare anyway. And the predictions were quite accurate—maybe just off by one or two dishes. Nobody was making fewer dishes than what was needed.

The stall owners were very surprised. They tried it for a week, and then they started following the program. Every day, the program would tell them how much to make because it had looked at the data for the last three years. It could make predictions based on old data, the number of students, the day of the month, the time of the year, and more.

Suddenly, the food wastage had dropped by about 80%! The program was so successful.

But there were still some dishes being wasted because you can't be 100% accurate. So Sarah asked her mom what to do.

Her mom said, "You know, there's a shelter very close to your school where poor people are staying. Maybe the school can send all the leftover dishes there. Your program can alert them that so many dishes are left today, and then they can come and collect it within one hour. Because the food gets spoiled in Singapore in about two hours."

So not only did Sarah cut the waste, she also made sure all the remaining food went to the food shelter.

The principal said, "This is real genius!"

Sarah did not have any programming experience. She did not need to know how computer programs work. She could only do simple English language prompts on one of the AI programs, and she was able to solve a big problem for the school. Food wastage was cut down, and the remaining food was going for a charitable cause.

The school gave her a big award. They called her "the AI Girl."

So Sarah became the AI Girl.

That's the story. With the current AI programs, any problem that you see, you are able to solve it. You don't need to know computer programming. You just need to have imagination. You are now limited only by imagination and creativity—not because you don't know how to do programming or you don't have access to technology.

And this is what Sarah figured out.

That's the story.