The Only 14 Ways to Make Money with AI in 2026

[00:00] Every single day, thousands of internet gurus tell you how to make money with AI, but 99% of them are full of s**t. Most of them haven't made a single dollar with AI. As someone who actually launches a new AI company every single month,

[00:14] most of which are making millions, I'll be ranking the only real ways to make money with AI. And at the end, I'll tell you exactly which one I'd pick and how you can actually build it. So let's start with the first idea, AI voice agents.

[00:27] So what we want to do is build an AI phone agent that books appointments, qualifies leads, and handles all calls for a business. Essentially, it's a full-time receptionist that doesn't sleep, doesn't complain, doesn't get sick, doesn't quit.

[00:39] And it helps businesses where one missed call could cost them thousands. For example, think about like plumbers, HVAC, law firms, dental clinics. And the crazy part is most businesses don't even know this exists yet,

[00:52] or they don't think it's that good. They're probably talking to AI right now and they don't even realize the person was AI. That's the window we're in right now. Now, I'll be ranking all of these AI businesses into one of four tiers. S tier, which is like super duper tier.

[01:05] A tier, which is an S, it's a little bit below, but it's still great. B tier, which is meh-uh. And then F tier, which is you might want to just ignore it and run away. And trust me, most of these experts are talking about ideas being like,

[01:18] this is the one to do that I would consider F tier. And to do that, we're going to look at three things. First off is profitability. How much money are people actually going to pay? And is it going to make you money? The second is competition.

[01:30] How crowded is the market I'm talking about? And the third is longevity. How long will this be relevant in the future? Because why would we do something that doesn't allow us to build real wealth? And just because of the speed AI is moving and changing that,

[01:44] things that we're talking about now that might make you some money will literally fall off a cliff in the near future. So where do we put the AI voice agent or assistant? Profitability is high. Right off the bat, I know what people are willing to pay. I talked to my barber about this.

[01:56] I talked to my friends that have local businesses. When the AI starts attacking the labor costs, essentially what you're paying for people and you can replace a person, all of a sudden now, anything you charge is like $500, $1,000,

[02:08] $1,500 a month, deals cheap. Next, we got competition. I think the market's pretty crowded. Every time I talk to people about an AI idea, they're always like, oh, I'm building the voice agent, I'm building the voice agent. And so good news is very few of them know how to market or sell.

[02:21] You can tell by just going through Google Local and calling those businesses and hear them answer with a real person. They're still not adopting it. So the competition is there. Like people are talking about it, but they don't have it widely used. And longevity, I think this will be relevant for a long time.

[02:36] Why? Because voice is the path to AI doing a lot of stuff for us. I think it's an A-tier opportunity. So it's a solid business. There's real demand. You can make good money. It's got legs. The next one is AI lead generation.

[02:49] This is where you build an AI that automates processing for businesses. It does research. It qualifies people. It gets data and essentially presents qualified leads to a business. What's super fun is you can use tools like Manus, Hog Co-Work, Gemini to essentially go find those leads and sell them to the business.

[03:08] Now, you're going to ask yourself, why doesn't the business do this for themselves? The truth is most entrepreneurs are already overwhelmed. they're busy and what they don't have enough of is leads so they're busy delivering for the customers they have and for you to come to them and say I got some more leads with phone numbers

[03:21] and emails that I can manage for you that is a huge value profitability it's actually pretty high because you're directly putting money on the table for these clients now when I think about like competition it's getting tougher there's actually new AI platforms like play.com that

[03:36] do this as a service so it costs money you can charge for those leads and they're really high quality. I have a friend, Hunter, that does this every day. He was getting paid to generate leads for people. Longevity is pretty strong because I always think there's a place where businesses

[03:49] need more leads. I think about businesses as like, what skill this is going to deliver me? Is this something I should learn? Do I need it for my own business? So if you're starting a company, learning how to generate leads, probably a good idea. So let's talk about where I tier this.

[04:03] I actually think this one is F tier. You're selling money. It's a clear value proposition. it's an easy guess and you can charge enough money because they know what a customer's worth for them to be able to make it really profitable. Next, let's talk about baseless AI YouTube channel.

[04:19] People are talking about this. It's the new rage where they're essentially creating a cash cow fantasy thing. I think it's bullshit. YouTube algorithm buries AI generated content. Today, that might change in the future, but as we stand today, it wants real organic engaging content.

[04:36] Channels get demonetized within weeks sometimes if that's all they're putting out is just AI slots. There's no brand being built, there's no audience or loyalty, and there's no way to stand out from the million of other AI channels. Profitability is almost zero because, again, channels get demonetized.

[04:51] The competition, I mean, everybody with an AI tool can essentially create these, so it's not that hard. Longevity? None. The faceless YouTube channel, which is essentially like bit-slinging AI slots

[05:03] to generate ads or sell something in, It's like the bottom feeder of the internet. People are already getting tired of this kind of faceless YouTube content. So I'm going to put this in the F tier, if that wasn't clearly and obvious right off the bat.

[05:17] I think it's interesting to learn how to get good at creating AI video generated content. That's a good skill to learn, but in regards to like a business, not my kind of business. And look, if you want my help to sell any of these AI companies without making a single phone call,

[05:31] I've got a gift for you. I have this whole process documented called my Sell by Chat Playbook. It's the exact process that I use in all my companies to help them make millions selling through direct messages over chat.

[05:43] It's got the offer template. It's got the structure, the nine box model, how to deal with objections. It even talks about the content you should be creating to attract people that are ready to buy. If you want it, find me on Instagram at Dan Martell and DM me YouTube SBC for Sell by Chat and I'll send it right over.

[05:59] Next, we've got AI content repurposing. This one's fun because you can take a long form video like this and turn it into short form content like tweets and carousels and newsletters.

[06:11] I think right now, for example, my threads are blown out by using content from my YouTube and just repurposing it on thread. You can use tools that are AI powered like Opus Clips and Descript to help you create this. So now let's break it down.

[06:23] First, we have profitability. This is pretty solid because every trader and company with a podcast, they need this. Next, I think about competition. especially it's pretty moderate because yes it's a growing category but a lot of people have already figured out how to do it themselves Then I think about longevity You know this is where I think it weak because the tools are catching up so quick where they starting to just repurpose on their own that your window may be kind of small

[06:46] in regards to how long you do this for. So I would grade this as a B tier. I'm a fan of learning how to do this. I think you should learn it for your own business, but I also think that long-term, it'll just be automated for everybody.

[06:58] Next, we've got AI consulting. You get paid to come in, audit a company's operations or systems or processes, and find every nook and cranny where AI can save them time, reduce waste, make things better.

[07:10] You could charge like $5,000 to audit any business and turn that into potentially a $50,000 implementation project. And companies know. Just look at the comments below. They know they should learn AI. They know they should use AI.

[07:23] They just don't know where to start. So you come in and you can be that person. So if I think about it, profitability, it's one of the top ones that I'm going to talk about in regards to making real money. Doing it for them, educating them, consulting them on it, huge.

[07:37] Competition, I mean, it's kind of low because there's not a lot of people that are qualified, that are good, that actually can say, look, I focus on this niche and I help people just like you. Most people can't do it well. When I think of longevity, I think consulting is always going to be needed.

[07:52] And AI is not going to slow down. It's not going to stop changing. And if somebody knows how to help a business get the bandwidth to implement it so they can keep doing what the business does and not have to worry about the tools and the AI. That's huge. It's strong.

[08:04] So I'm going to give this an F tier. Because it's also, if you have domain experience, it's a great place to start. And I even like it better than lead gen, so we're going to put it in front of that. I like it better because you've got more meat on the bones for money,

[08:19] and what's called revenue growth, because you can sell more things to people, and it gets you in the game to see other opportunities, whereas lead gen, you're just kind of like, it's a transaction. Next up, we have virtual assistants.

[08:31] Now, as a guy who wrote the book, Buy Back Your Time, my inbox is full. Literally, the top five virtual agencies in the world are like, where do you see AI disrupting us? You're kind of cooked.

[08:43] Using AI tools to handle your email, your scheduling, researching things for busy times, essentially acting as the chief of staff, this is what AI does better than anything. And again, I have a dog in the fight.

[08:55] I built a whole platform called Apex that allows agents, virtual agents, to execute. That's what it stands for, agents, platforms for execution, to do this kind of work for business owners. My guy is called Kai, and Kai does everything.

[09:08] He's my chief of staff. He manages my inbox. He manages my calendar. He coordinates projects. He checks my Slack. He follows up on things. He even makes phone calls. He even hired a bunch of people, like my real estate guy named Reece, and he does a lot of cool real estate projects for me, but these aren't real people.

[09:22] And if you want to check out Apex, just click the link below in the description. So here's what I think about this opportunity. One, profitability, it's decent, right? You get three to five clients paying you, you're doing the work, you're managing the agents.

[09:34] They really think that is the future of AI anyways, an agent operator. Then we go to competition, pretty crowded. Everyone that knows how to use Cloud Cowork can kind of get all this stuff for free. And everybody and their mom seems to be offering this. And the longevity is kind of moderate.

[09:47] The AI can kind of do this. So then the real value kind of looks like the consulting at scale where you're coming in with business processes, not just being a virtual assistant. So I think we are a B, but I do think the value prop is stronger than content repurposing because it has a clear value of saving somebody's time.

[10:08] Now, I know I said I have Apex and you're thinking I'm rating this opportunity B. That specific one for virtual assistant, yes. Apex essentially is a whole team of AI agents that work to accomplish business goals.

[10:21] That's different. And the virtual assistant part inside of that is just a tiny little part. And don't forget, at the end of this video, I'll be showing you my exact steps on how I'd launch my top pick. And I've got some bangers coming. Next, we've got AI chat agents.

[10:35] Local businesses, yes, they get phone calls, but a lot of people email. A lot of people go to the website and they chat. I was just looking into booking dinner tonight, and I didn't want to even go through OpenTable. I'm lazy. I wish I could have just like started chatting on the website. But no,

[10:48] they didn't have an AI chat agent ready to go. They're trying to force me through their interface. Interfaces are dead. Okay. So we just all agree. People that want to book local businesses, they want instant replies. They don't want to even call. They want to chat. And the cool part

[11:02] is that when you deploy these AI chats within a business, you just build a monthly retainer. So let's run through this. We've got profitability. It's good because of the monthly retainer. That's where the real money stacks. If you don't have a reoccurring revenue component to your business,

[11:14] add one. Then I think competition is pretty crap. I mean, there's a lot of people. I'm an investor in Intercom. They kind of led the space for like AI powered chat and the barrier is pretty low

[11:26] because like anybody can build one of these, no problem. When I think of longevity, I mean, it's kind of moderate, you know, like how competitive is this? Is this just going to be built into every frontier AI model or other companies just going to keep adding compelling

[11:40] chat options into the software they're already selling to the businesses. So I'm going to put it in A behind the voice agent. The reason why, I think the voice agent is more compelling, but what I see a lot of people, they use the chat to qualify and then kick it into the voice agent

[11:56] for booking or having them call using the AI. So it's there, it's great, but it's not going to be as good as the voice. Next we have AI trading bots. So this one is interesting because where a lot of

[12:08] people are selling bots to do something from a business point of view. Now you've got your bot that technically can make you money. Here's the thing nobody's telling you. Everybody selling some kind of trading bot is essentially selling you a course. They don't got a bot. Dude, if I

[12:22] had a bot that made me 20% every year, guess what? I wouldn't tell anybody about it. There are companies like Renaissance Technologies, D.E. Shaw, True Sigma that are so good at using AI to trade

[12:34] that they're only trading the employees' money and it's like 10 to 15 billion and nobody can even invest because that's how good it is. These AI bots, essentially they're selling signals.

[12:46] They're like marketing companies and the signals only last for like 16 months and then they gotta find the next signal and then you gotta buy the next thing. If the bots actually worked, why would anyone sell it to you for $97?

[12:58] So essentially the business you could be in is trying to build these bots, market these bots and get people to buy them from you. If you want to create the bot, is it profitable for you? Yeah, because you're selling the course,

[13:11] you're selling the dream, you're selling the vision. They're buying from you. Let's just leave the ethics out of it. Competitive? Yeah there a lot of people out there Longevity I think zero I think it one of those things where you build it it doesn work you try to get it going And it also really risky because people are paying you

[13:28] to invest. And if you don't deliver, I feel like you're getting in the SEC territory of maybe them not liking what you're doing. So I would rank it as S. It's the best. I'm kidding. It's ranked at the bottom. I mean, come on. You're selling hopes and dreams. It's not very good business.

[13:42] Next we have AI agent development. This is where people pay you to create some of these AI agents like I was saying earlier. Like my guy Kai who can do all this cool stuff. They have to be designed. I'm talking about like sales bots and document processors and operational bots and like all

[13:58] these AI agents. The difference between the virtual assistant and this, this is like selling a team. You have your chief of staff agent and then the agent manages several other agents and those are like virtual employees. So the profitability, if you get it right, massive. I really think

[14:13] this is a big opportunity. The competition today, most people can't even explain what this is. So it's low because it's hard. You need to have more technical experience, which keeps most people out. But the longevity is strong. Everything that I'm seeing that agents is the iPhone moment of AI

[14:30] is huge. You create these repeatable workflows and then you just get paid to drop them in and they're attacking the labor dollars on a small business's expenses. It's going to allow them to

[14:42] scale without adding people. I consider this the top opportunity right now. If you've got the technical know-how and you want to go and live in that world, it is the S of the S of the S.

[14:54] Next, we have AI copywriting. Landing pages, case studies, sales emails. Essentially, AI writes every first draft. And the cool part is you can do it in your voice and it can follow a strategic process to generate sales. Generals are getting crushed. There's a lot of people that did copywriting and

[15:09] they did a lot of stuff. It's the specialists who niche down into one industry and really focus on delivering a solution, not just AI, but actually a solution for a business that are going to win.

[15:21] The key is don't be an AI writer. Be the person who writes for one type of business and manages all the words that go out. So when I think of profitability, it's decent. It's actually pretty good because most people would have to pay an agency $10,000 to $15,000 a month to do that.

[15:36] Competition is high. This AI copywriting is probably the most popular use case in all AI. And the longevity is kind of shaky. Back in the day, it required some kind of like system prompt

[15:49] design to be able to make it right, like the person and the tone. But now right out of the box, these new models are getting pretty good. So for you to stand out, it's going to be pretty difficult. So if you're specific enough, niche enough, and really doing something personalized,

[16:04] then you're at the top of B. If you're not and you're just doing anything for anybody, then you're just like Claude or any other AI model and you're probably at the bottom of the list. Next up, we have the AI Venture Studio. Essentially, it's the idea that most entrepreneurs

[16:16] have, which is pick a lot of ideas. I want to build a lot of stuff. So I have a studio where I create a lot of different AI companies. Think about like if you had a factory that churned out profitable businesses on repeat, that's a venture studio. And the cool part is,

[16:31] pretty much since December, the whole world's changed where any person with an idea can actually get an app built themselves. They can do it themselves. I sat down my company for two days and taught everybody how to code in QuadCode. Profitability, truth is, is unlimited. And the

[16:45] cool part is if you do it right, every company is built to sell, built to go public. And then the winners get to ride and then you just kill the losers because you tested them and validated them with very little investment up front.

[16:57] In regards to competition, I mean, there's a lot of people that might call themselves a studio, but they don't compete. They don't have distribution. They don't have brand. They don't know product. They don't know how to get customers. Most people can't think at this level.

[17:10] It's a completely different experience. You need to have the business background, the marketing background, the leadership background, the capital to be able to hire and build teams. And then when I think of longevity, this is how you create ongoing enterprise value over

[17:22] time. It's how you build the flywheel that eventually takes off. And then you create the machine that builds the machine. That's the whole point of the Venture Studio. So personally, I'm not going to rank it F, even though that's what I do.

[17:34] Martell Ventures is a Venture Studio that builds AI-powered companies. The problem is that for most people, it's too advanced of a move. Yeah, I'm putting an A-. Next, we've got an AI-to-AI marketplace.

[17:46] This one is so fun. Did you know there's a website where AI agents hire humans? It's called rentahuman.ai. It's kind of crazy. I think they've had over 700,000 humans registered and 200,000 jobs already go out there for the AI agents to hire humans.

[18:02] So just so you know, if you don't get into the AI like we're talking about, then someday you'll either be the person leading it or working for the AI. But the other part is that AI will be buying from AI. Stripe, which is the number one merchant provider in the world, just came out with a protocol to enable this.

[18:18] Google jumped on board. So this is the opportunity. You decide to build the Facebook marketplace, right, of AI agents. And you decide to like figure out what would be valuable and how you rank them and make sure there's no security issues with them. And just like market the marketplace so

[18:33] you can be like the Airbnb of AI agents. Now let's talk about this in regards to where it sits in the ranking. First off, is it profitable? Well, you'll probably get on the low end 10%, on the high end, 30% of that connection in that fee. So there's some money, but it's not wild.

[18:49] The competition, I mean, almost nobody out there has built this yet at scale. There's no like eBay of AI to AI marketplace. And then longevity, marketplaces are wildly defensible if you can get

[19:03] it going, like Uber, like Airbnb, like Instacart. These are incredibly valuable businesses. So that's the upside. In regards to where I'd rank this as an opportunity for people to make money with AI, it would probably be harder to do that than start a venture studio. But I do like it.

[19:21] I don't have an AI marketplace business yet. This might be the moment I decide to build one. I'm going to put it on the top of A. I'm not going to think you can't do this. I actually think you can. So now we have two more and I'm going to tell you which one I would pick and how I would

[19:35] go about launching it so you can use that blueprint to launch your own. Next, we have AI logo and brand design. Now, this is getting paid to use AI to generate logos and brand kits and examples of

[19:47] brands on products. They use tools like Nanobanana to do some of this. Manus can do a lot. So you can approach these businesses to get paid to do this as long as they like more involved projects Profitability it kind of mean because you can still get paid what people think it worth Like the other day I designed a website that in the past I would have paid It had animation and effects I value something and you can sell it Then the profitability could be there

[20:13] So you might not be able to charge that much, but trust me, people are willing to pay. The competition, you got a lot, right? You got all the tools, you got the people using the tools, And then longevity, I just don't see a world where long-term, this is not something that most people can't solve themselves by just asking their AI.

[20:33] Because you're probably doing it already, where you just ask the AI to design your website and say, make it look like Apple designed it, and boom, most beautiful day in the world. So I'm going to give this one a B tier ranking right after copywriting.

[20:46] because I think copywriting sells money, brand is identity, some people value it, but it doesn't have the longevity I would like. Next up, we have manage AI cybersecurity. This is where you get paid to use AI to manage the threats on a business 24-7,

[21:01] everything from phishing attempts to getting past their firewall to sending spam emails like social engineering where people are using AI to spoof a person's voice. We've detected suspicious activity on your account.

[21:15] Can you tell me your login information? Just kidding. I'm safe. It's kind of crazy. I mean, one breach can cost a company millions. You essentially can get paid to help the business understand security and put basic things in place.

[21:29] Most people barely understand AI, let alone understand the risk that AI in the hands of bad people can be used to actually attack you from security points. So that's where you come in. Profitability? Wildly profitable. It's massive.

[21:41] You can charge a lot of money per month because not having somebody's systems go down would be massive value. Now you are selling like insurance where they only know they need you once they have an incident.

[21:53] But you can sell enterprise level contracts and that's where the big money comes from. The competition, because it's so technical, almost none. Now there are people out there that have AI platforms for this and people that are specialists in security.

[22:07] So if you love to do this, you're well positioned for this. In longevity, I just think the more AI gets powerful, the more there's going to be need for AI experts to stop the cyber attacks, stop the hackers, stop the AI powered hacking.

[22:20] And that's a great market to be in. Now I'm going to put it in S tier right behind agent development because I think agent development is easier, less technical and you can get paid. But the cybersecurity is a huge opportunity. So now that I've ranked everyone, now I'm going to tell you how I would launch my favorite.

[22:35] So clearly that's agent development. Here are my five steps. Number one is I got to validate. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a landing page. I'm going to have AI create this. And it's going to talk about my agent development. But I'm going to pick one use case.

[22:48] I'm going to pick chief of staff because that's the thing that everybody needs. They all know they need somebody to help them with their email and scheduling and follow-up and vehicles and all that stuff. So you can create a simple landing page that talks about this new AI power chief of staff that they can buy and they can get added to the waitlist.

[23:04] Now, after you build that page, I then want you to text every person you know in your phone. This is what I do. I just ask them, who do you know that's looking for an AI-powered chief of staff that helps them get back 10 to 15 hours of their week and manage more projects?

[23:19] Send, send, send. If you want that little script, it's in the description below. So just go grab it. The cool part is you're not asking if they want it. You're asking if they know anybody, but most people are going to reply and say, well, I want that. Then the next thing you got to do is ask if they would pay to solve that problem today.

[23:35] So we do that to validate. That's number one. Second, we have to pre-sell. I'm a big fan of crowdfunding. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. People launch ideas and crowdfund it, have people support it, and they do it with one page.

[23:47] You can do the same thing. The landing page we just created, that's essentially the offer page. And now what we do behind the wait list is we actually email those people and say, we actually are opening up our early adopter program. if you'd like to be part of it.

[24:00] Here's how much it costs and send them a payment link and see if they buy. Maybe you get on a call with them and you walk them through it. But those same people that you contacted, maybe they replied or they referred people or they joined the wait list, those are the people

[24:12] that you want to use to pre-sell, to validate that your problem is a real problem, a pain killer problem, not a vitamin problem. Then the third step is launch it manually. You can literally launch what I just said

[24:24] by manually doing it for people. No core tech, No like deep AI agentic stuff. Yes, eventually you'll get that, but you can just bring them on in a consulting approach, a concierge approach and customize the tech for them.

[24:37] So you can prove a real transaction, deliver real value before you build or automate anything. Now I want to go build my audience. So my favorite way to do that is find the people that are already talking about the problem

[24:49] and then see if I can partner with them to promote my business, my AI, my landing page. And you can do that right now. You can go find people currently talking about chief of staff using AI and see if they want to promote your company.

[25:01] So that is how we build the wait list. Again, we haven't even launched publicly, but you can recruit partners, give them a link that's unique to them, track that they're referring people, and then pay them if those people buy. This is basically the distribution of our idea to the world through other people.

[25:17] So unless you already have an audience, partner with somebody who does. Number five, which is last, is productize. Notice how most people start here and I'm saying it's the last thing. Once you have the transactions and they're consistent, you're automating and you're doing most of it manually.

[25:30] You have the partners that are promoting it out there and you're getting paid to do it. Then you take the income and you reinvest it in building it out. That is how you can launch any single one of these ideas to any market and get there fast.

[25:43] This is how I've built every one of my companies. This is my process. I keep doing it every month. Now, I know that was a lot, but basically what I want you to get out of this is, first off, you're not behind. There are so many opportunities ahead of you and you just might have been

[25:57] following the wrong map and you're just in the wrong destination. So now all you have to do is just pick one. Pick one of these ideas. Use my feedback as the guide, but just stay focused. Build yourself. Invest in yourself. Understand that business is there to develop you. People

[26:14] who win aren't the ones who start first. They're literally the ones who don't quit. The people that kept showing up. They kept putting one foot in front of the other. And over time, they built the business. Out of all these ideas, which one did you find the most interesting? Just let me

[26:28] know below in the comments. And remember, DM me YouTube SBC on Instagram, Adam Martell, for the offer template. We have the sell by chat, the structure, even the content. And if you want to learn how to build a business that runs itself, click the video and I'll see you on the other side.