How To Make Money By Using AI— In 2026

Most people use AI for productivity. A few use it to create wealth.

Aditya Kumar

It’s been quite a while since I last published a story.

The reason for the delay is that I was working on some special and unique research that required a significant amount of time, attention, and effort.

I wanted to make sure that the insights and ideas shared in this story were valuable, well-researched, and worth your time.

A lot of hard work has gone into creating this piece, and I’m excited to finally share it with you.

I sincerely hope you enjoy reading it. After you’ve finished the story, please take a moment to leave your review and share your thoughts.

Your feedback means a lot and is greatly appreciated.

AI has changed how you can make money in 2026, but most people are still playing by the old rules.

If we cut through all the fluff, there are three ways that you can make money.

• You can make money by starting your own business, creating your own source of income.
• You can make money by working a job,
• You can make money by taking your income and buying assets that pay you for owning them.

How you can use AI to increase how much money you’re making, whether it’s with changing fast in 2026.

When you work a job, you are capped on how much money you can make based on how many hours you put in. But when you own the business, there’s no cap.

Let’s assume you work a job making $20 an hour. And your job is to sell this guacamole, which has a margin, meaning a profit of $5 for every sale that you make.

After 5 hours of working, you were going to have made $100 regardless of whether you sold one of these guacamole sides or a hundred of these guacamole sides.

But as the business owner, it’s a little bit different. As the business owner, if you sell one of those guacamole sides during those 5 hours, you would have lost $95 because you paid $100 here and only made $5 in profit.

But if you sold 100 of these guacamole sides in those 5 hours, well, now you made $500 in profit with $100 in cost, which means you net $400 as the business owner.

As the business owner, you’re taking on more risk, but you don’t have a cap.

As an employee, you have a cap based on your salary, unless you work a job where you also get some sort of profit-sharing, equity, or other incentive tied to the profit or commission you generate.

But what kind of business should you start? There are 4 different types of businesses that you may want to consider starting in 2026, depending on what your interests are.

Number 1: AI consultant.

AI is changing our economy faster than smartphones, faster than the internet, faster than social media, but most businesses statistically still are not hip with AI, and many companies have no idea how to even start with ChatGPT.

This creates a huge opportunity for tech-savvy people to start teaching these businesses how to get hip with AI.

But I want you to be specific here. For this to work, there are three parts that you have to identify.

#1: Who is the niche?

#2: What is the pain?

#3: How do you make money?

• Niche 1: Dentists.

Painpoint: having to train hygienists. That takes time, that takes energy. Solution: build an AI SOP that can train hygienists on what exactly needs to be done, and how they can find the task.

That way, they can avoid spending hours training every new hygienist.

• Niche 2: Attorneys.

Painpoint part two is that they spend a lot of time on the internet researching stuff when AI ChatGPT could do it for them.

So the solution here is how attorneys can save 5 hours of work every week just by using AI for the research.

And just a couple of other examples to really hammer this point home. You can help accountants save time on building financial projections for their clients.

That way, now they can demonstrate the value of their work to get more clients, retain their clients, and save time.

You can work with realtors on how to build better listing descriptions. That way, they can save time, sell more houses, and make more money.

So, you understand the niche. You understand the pain point and the product. How do you make money? And there are two ways that you can do this now.

#1. You can charge a fat fee, $1,000, $2,500, or $5,000, depending on how in-depth your consulting is going to be, to show them how to do the work.

How do I know that this works? Because I have spent many thousands of dollars training not just me, but also my team, my employees, learning how to use AI. So, I know that this business model exists.

#2. You can put an ongoing reoccurring model where, if you’re going to actually do the work for them, you can charge the business $500 a month, $1,000 a month, $5,000 a month, depending on how involved you’re going to be to actually continue building and upkeeping their AI tools that you help build them, whether it’s clawed projects, chat GPTs, whatever the tools are.

You are now going to charge them to actually do and manage that work for them.

You build a product, and now you let AI help build the store and market the product.

If you have a product idea in your mind, it has never been so accessible to actually launch the product.

And I’m going to be honest with you, starting a business is hard.

The first real digital company that I started, it was an e-commerce product, a water-resistant sock.

When I first launched it, it took a lot of work because I wanted to have the perfect website, the perfect-looking store, and all these other things.

And the reality is, most people never actually launch their business because they think it’s going to be too expensive and too complicated.

So they say, “One day I’ll start my business. One day I’ll start that side hustle,” but that one day never comes.

Business opportunity 2: This is a local service.

This would be starting something like a window cleaning service, a lawn care service, a snowplow service, a handyman service, a house cleaning service, a moving service, or a car detailing service, some sort of physical labor, or some sort of local service.

The nice thing about this is that this product is always in demand.

Homeowners will always need these products, and it doesn’t cost much to get started. Plus, the margins are pretty good.

You’ll generally be able to charge somewhere between $50 to $150 an hour, depending on what you’re doing and how good you are.

This is a local service.

Now, you’re saying, “Hey Aditya, what does this have to do with AI? What does window cleaning or cutting lawns have to do with AI?” Well, it does.

Not only can you use AI to build your website, to build your blog posts for SEO traffic, to build your marketing campaigns, to build you all that stuff, but I was talking to a window washer who was doing this exact thing with AI.

And what they’re using AI for is to do their quoting automatically because previously they’d have to go to people’s houses to get that quote.

That’s very expensive because if you have to go to 5 houses a day, well, you might only be able to go to3,4,5,6, 7 houses a day, depending on how far they are.

And now you can give a lot more quotes, get more business, but then you can also build better routes.

That way, you can time where you’re going to go much better because now, instead of trying to build that map or where you need to go, you put into AI which houses you have to hit over the course of a week, and it will build a map for you as to where you should go first.

That way, you can spend less time driving, waste less gas, and do more work.

Not to mention that now, because of AI, you can build an automated system to get five-star reviews and to make sure that people pay you on time.

Business opportunity 4: knowledge service.

This means selling a piece of your knowledge.

• So maybe you’re a fitness coach.
• Maybe you are an accountant or an attorney.
• Maybe you are a marketer.
• Maybe you’re really good at digital marketing.

This is really good knowledge that you have that you can now monetize using the internet, using AI.

How? Well, take this knowledge that you have and find the right audience for it. And now figure out a product that can serve that audience.

So, if you’re a fitness coach, it could be one-on-one fitness classes, or it could be a $99 6 week fitness class that you purchase, or a more expensive one-on-one fitness class.

If you are an accountant or an attorney, it could be a class on how a business can legally spend less money on taxes.

You bet that there are going to be businesses that would spend money to do that, then maybe don’t want to pay the full $5,000 or $10,000 to hire your accounting or legal firm.

Maybe you are a really good digital marketer, and you can now show businesses how you can help them improve their sales through your digital marketing.

Now, realistically, no one’s going to care because digital marketing is so broad. But if you can show a business a specific result, how you can get 10,000 hits to your website a month using SEO traffic using these 5 strategies that you’ve identified, how a business can grow their leads by 500 leads a month using paid ads on Facebook using this new strategy that you have, this is now a way that you can actually monetize it.

The more niche you can get, the better, especially as you get started. Then, as you get started, you can grow from there. But focus on that niche first.

Now again, how can AI help you? One of the most powerful things that AI can do is to analyze your data, especially as a business owner, because now what you can do if you have any sort of marketing is you feed this marketing into a Google sheet or an Excel sheet, and you put it into AI, and you have it analyze what is working and what’s not working.

Because ultimately, when you go out and create a product, you’re probably going to have a whole bunch of different types of marketing.

You might have videos, you might have a podcast, you might have blog posts, you might have some advertisements that you’re running, but you don’t know where the money is coming from.

If you cannot identify, pinpoint exactly which piece of content, which YouTube video, which Instagram reel, which Facebook ad, which blog post is bringing that money, you can’t optimize your business.

And this is the part that used to be very difficult to do, but AI has made it so much easier for you to analyze this data.

Before, you might have had to pay a data analyst.

Now you put in the chatbot, put it into the cloud, and you get this result, which is these are the places where your money is coming.

If you’re not putting more money into those places and you’re putting money in other places, you’re wasting money.

This is where you can now optimize and grow your business because you already have the product.

• You know what you’re good at.
• You have this knowledge.
• You’re a fitness coach.
• You’re an accountant.
• You’re an attorney.
• You’re a marketer, whatever you have, etc.

Now, you just want to have more customers. And if you want more customers, you have to know where the customers are coming from.

When you can identify where they’re coming from, you can put more fire on that place.

And then on the back end, you can find out who your best customers are and sell them more products, sell them more services. That way, we can continue to optimize and grow your business.

So, we know that things are changing fast in 2026 because of AI. And the first way that you can increase your income in 2026 is we’re working to create income by starting a business.

Now again, this is the most risky, but also has the most upside potential.

We’ve talked about how you can be an AI consultant to help more businesses get hip with AI, and you can charge them a flat fee or a recurring fee, depending on what you want to do.

Number 2 is that you can create your own product. And now there are so many tools like our sponsor that I talked about that can help you build these websites to launch your product much quicker, much easier, and more cost-effectively than before.

Number 3, we talked about building a local service and using AI to amplify and market that local service because the reality is that a lot of handymen and electricians, movers, and car washers are not using AI to optimize their businesses, which gives you an added opportunity.

And number four is knowledge services. If you have a skill and you can monetize the skill, AI can help you scale that business much faster.

Now, the reality is that starting a business is not for most people.

2. Work Salary

This is where we can move, which is how you can use AI to make more money from your job.

Number 1: You can use AI to help you increase your salary.

If you go to your boss and you say, “Hey boss, can I have an extra $10,000?” they’re going to say, “Thank you for letting me know. We’ll think about it and get back to you.” And then they’re probably going to say, “Uh, maybe not.”

But if you have more of a compelling argument, well, now you have a better chance of getting that raise.

And to help you get that compelling argument, AI can help you with that, because now the first thing you can do is see if you are being fairly paid.

You can just go on to chatpt, go on to cloud, go to whatever AI you want and ask it, “I am a insert your title. I’ve been working for x number of years. I’m living in this city. What is the competitive market salary for somebody in my position? Give me sources.”

Now, all of a sudden, you can see if you’re being adequately compensated or not. If you’re not being adequately compensated, now you have a little bit of data to go and back your decision.

But that’s not all. AI can help you mark and navigate your achievements because when you do something, a lot of times we forget about it unless you actually put it somewhere.

And you can start storing it in your ChatGPT, in your cloud, or wherever. That way, you keep this record of all the things that you’re doing.

That way, it can help prepare a script or a document to request this raise. And then AI can help you with the most important part, justifying that raise.

Because the problem that a lot of people make when they go and ask for a raise is they say, “Can I have more money?” The boss says, “Why should you get more money?” And they say, “Well, I did all these things in the past.”

And the boss is going to say, “I’ve already paid you for those things, so you want me to pay you more for the things you did yesterday?”

And then the employee says, “No, no, no, but because I did a good job, I want a raise.”

The boss is going to say, “Well, that was part of your job anyway.” And now you can start to see how there’s not a very strong argument for a raise.

But the real value is if you can say, “Hey boss, I’m going to help make you richer. I’m going to make you an extra $20,000. Can you give me a raise of $10,000?” Now, that boss is going to be much more likely to give you a raise if you can show that you’re going to make the boss a richer person.

But how do you do that? You have to understand how you’re driving revenue for the company.

You have to be able to show how you’re going to drive more revenue, how you’re going to drive more income, how you’re going to drive more business.

And this is where you can talk to ChatGPT, you can talk to the cloud, to get an idea of what those pain points are that the business has.

That way, you can go in and reframe this argument, reframe this discussion in a way that’s favorable for you because you’re going to show how you’re going to drive business for the company and how that should translate to more dollars in your pocket.

#2: The second way that AI can make you more money is by increasing your productivity.

The person who’s going to be replaced by AI isn’t going to be the person who’s replaced by a robot.

It’s going to be the person replaced by somebody else who understands AI.

The reason is that companies are going to want more productivity. That’s what AI is going to do.

That AI is going to make it so that you’re going to be able to do three times more work than somebody could do three years ago.

Now, that’s going to sound like a whole lot of extra work that you have to take on, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

People can be much more productive, get more work done, and get more efficient work done because of AI, because you can now outsource certain things and get more work done, get more research done, and get it done faster with AI.

And the people who understand this are going to have more job security and have a better chance of getting a raise because you can be ahead of all of your colleagues, ahead of all of your other co-workers.

You’re saying, “How do I use AI to become more productive?” Well, here’s a little secret. Ask AI. If you don’t know what to ask, ask what you should ask.

Go to Chat GPT and say, “Hey, I do this job. I don’t know how to be more productive. What questions should I ask you? That way, I could do better at my job?”

And it’s going to give you a list of questions. And now, just get a voice recorder, record your answer, because when you talk, you’re going to give a much more thorough answer.

Copy that answer, paste it into ChatGPT, paste it into Claude, and see what your output is.

Now, all of a sudden, you start to see different ways that you can be more productive at your work, to save time, get more work done, and maybe make some more money.

And then, of course, you can use AI to help you find a new job. If you are not happy with where you are, well, you can use this AI to help you find another place to work.

• It can help you find another industry.
• It can help you find a different job in your industry that’s going to pay you more money.
• It can also help you craft your interview process better.

Now, the mistake that I don’t want you to avoid is that we’ve hired several people here who understand AI, and what we’ve seen has really ramped up a lot, with people using AI during the interview processes during virtual interviews, because during the initial rounds of hiring for our company, we have virtual interviews.

People would use these AI tools to listen to what we’re saying and then give them an output.

It became extremely clear when somebody was using an AI, and we immediately ended the interview when it became obvious that you were using an AI.

And employers are starting, and I don’t think they’re there yet, but they’re starting to get more hip to this idea of people using AI in their interview process.

Don’t do it. You’re going to look stupid, especially as businesses get smarter.

But you can use AI to understand how to prepare for the interview. You can use AI to help you with interview questions. You can use AI to make your resume better. You can use AI to make your cover letter better.

Don’t just copy and paste it, but use it as a resource to make your stuff better.

And the better the questions that you ask AI, the better your output is going to be.

Because if you’re saying, “What are you talking about? The AI answers are stupid.” Well, that means you haven’t spent enough time learning how to use the AI yet.

Go on to YouTube, learn about prompting, learn how to ask better questions, and then see what your outputs are, and you’ll see how much better it can be.

So, now we talked about how you can use AI to create a business.

• We talked about how you can build an AI consulting company.
• We talked about how you can use AI to help launch a product,
• How you can use AI to start a knowledge-based company,
• How you can use AI to start a local-based service.

Then we talked about number two, how you can use AI to make more money from your job, whether it be to increase your salary, to increase your productivity, or to get a new job.

Now, let’s talk about how you can turn your income into assets. And this is where we’re going to go outside of AI for just a second and understand the difference between assets and liabilities, because this is the part that they should have taught you before you graduated high school.

And the reality is, wealthy people in this economic system want to own assets. Everybody else spends their money buying liabilities.

A liability is something that takes money out of your pocket, and that’s it.

• When you buy a car, it’s a liability.
• When you buy clothes, it’s a liability.
• You buy a vacation, it’s a liability.
• Go out to eat at a restaurant, that’s a liability.

An asset is something that’s going to put money back in your pocket.

• When you buy stocks, you’re buying them to make money.
• When you buy real estate as an investment, you’re buying it to make money.
• When you’re building a business, you’re investing money to make more money.

And what wealthy people want to do is they want to own more of these assets.

Now, certain assets make you money when the price of the asset goes up. If you buy a stock for $100 and it goes up to $200, you made money if you sell. You don’t actually make money if you don’t sell.

But certain assets will pay you even if you don’t sell. You buy a stock for $100, it goes up to $110, but it pays you $2 along the way. Even if the stock goes down to $90, you still get paid those $2.

This is called cash flow. And certain investments will pay you with this cash flow when you buy them.

Now, you’re not working to sell the investment for a big profit.

You just want to own the right assets that are paying you with cash flow. And over time, you’re going to be working to stack that cash flow.

This is what cash flow investing is all about. And there are a few ways that you can do this.

• You can invest in dividend-paying stocks.
• You can invest in rental properties.
• You can lend your money out and generate interest.

These are all ways now for you to generate income from your investments. And this means now you take your extra money and you’re going to work to buy assets with this extra money.

Now, the mistake that a lot of people make is they get caught up in this idea of passive income, that I am struggling with my money, I don’t have money to pay my bills, I can’t afford groceries, I need passive income. That’s not how it works.

That’s how you get caught up in all the scams and schemes and stupid stuff on the internet. That’s not how it works.

This cash flow, this passive income, is you take the extra income that you do not spend, and you work to take that extra income to buy an asset, dividend-paying stocks, rental properties, or other lending opportunities that are going to pay you with interest.

You take that extra money, buy those assets, and in the beginning, you’re going to get paid nothing.

Essentially, you’re going to get paid pennies. It’s not going to feel like anything, but it takes a decade of sacrifice to really start to see some growth here.

What I like to say is year 1, year 2, or year 3, you’re really not going to make any returns.

In Year 4, you start to see a little bit.

In year 5, you start to see a little bit more.

Year 6, you’re starting to see a little bit now of decent gains. You’re starting to see the opportunity.

Year 7 finally starts to feel a little bit better. You’re starting to see the 7 years worth of consistent investing, 7 years worth of gains.

Year 8 starts to feel a little bit better.

Year 9, you’re starting to really see the opportunity of this cash flow.

Now, in year 10, you’ve built a whole new stream of solid cash flow from your investments.

The problem is that most people are not willing to do that.

Most people are not willing to wait a decade to see that consistent cash flow.

But if you’re willing to do it for a decade, you can build a whole stream of cash flow that you can use to improve your lifestyle and maybe even replace your income from your job, depending on how aggressive you are with your investments.

And maybe it doesn’t happen in 10 years. Maybe it takes 20 years. Maybe it takes 30 years, depending on how much money you’re investing and what your expenses look like.

But that path is there for the people who are willing to work for it.

Again, now you’re saying, “How can you use AI here?”

You want to understand how AI is impacting our economy because we talked about it here on the business side that AI is changing businesses, and certain businesses that are using AI are going to be able to accelerate in every industry.

Dentist offices that use AI are probably going to end up beating the dentist offices that don’t use AI because they’re going to be able to do better marketing, get better returns, and grow their businesses more.

Window washers that use AI are probably going to outperform window washers that don’t use AI over the next 5 to 7 years.

And so this is where, as an investor, you can start thinking about this on a broader scale as you’re investing in companies because you don’t have to invest in the AI company itself, but you can invest in the companies that are using AI.

It’s kind of like understanding how picks and shovels work. When the gold rush was happening, everybody wanted to dig for gold.

But the people who got rich were the people who were selling the shovels and the picks.

It’s the same with AI. Some companies are building the backbone of AI that you can invest in.

This is the AI infrastructure, but you can also invest in the companies that are just using AI to improve their products, to improve their processes, to outbeat their competitors.

And that’s where, now, as you start thinking about your investments, before it was just looking at the stock, looking at the valuations, looking at the financials, but now it’s also looking at the innovation because the companies that are innovating are going to be able to grow even faster.

And that’s something you want to think about as an investor as well.

So, what we talked about today is how you can grow your income in 2026 utilizing AI.

• We talked about how you can do this by building your own business.
• Whether that’s you consulting businesses on how to use AI.
• Whether that’s launching a product-based business using AI to help you get it launched.
• Whether that’s building a local service using AI to help you improve it.
• Whether that’s building a knowledge-based business using AI to improve it.

In any case, you’re building a business, you’re creating an income, most risk, most potential, but you’re using AI to help scale it and grow it.

Option 2 is to work to improve your salary.

• You can do that with AI by number one asking AI if you’re fairly compensated to help you in the negotiation of your salary.
• You can use it to improve your productivity as an employee,
• Number three, you can use it to help you find a new job.

And lastly, I talked about how you can convert your income into assets to create new income, and how you can use AI to help you with that as well.

Thank you for reading 🙂

This article was originally published on Medium.