How do I use AI
to make money?

The honest answer: you don't

This is a dumb question for most people — and I say that with love, because the internet already ran this experiment. When the web arrived, everyone asked "how do I make money online?" as if ONLINE was the money. It wasn't. Same thing now: AI isn't the money either. If you've never made a dollar online, never built a business, a magic tool doesn't change what's in your head.

"If an idiot uses it, you're going to be more of an idiot."

Here's the mechanism: if you can't validate what AI gives you, you'll use it wrong — or worse, you won't even read it, you'll just assume it's correct. Sure, AI can build you a website. It can build you an app. But if you don't understand business, you've just got a very fast website for a business that doesn't exist.

The gap nobody talks about

AI has knowledge. It doesn't have experience. The knowledge is everything ever written down — Wikipedia, cited papers, and a lot of absolute bullshit besides. What it can never have is what's EXPERIENCED — the stuff in your head from actually doing the thing. That gap is where every dollar lives.

It's why this came naturally to me: businesses since 24, hustling since 18, doing my own marketing, generating my own clients, running operations on ClickUp, Monday, Airtable, HubSpot — and wiring Make.com, Zapier and webhooks together years before ChatGPT existed. I knew exactly what I wanted the machine FOR. Now people pay for my knowledge of it. That's the pattern: the experience was mine; AI multiplied it.

The tree-chopper test

So drill down into what you already know. Say you're a tradie who chops trees. Don't ask "how do I make money with AI" — ask "what's the most annoying part of tree work?" Quoting. Someone has to drive out and look at a tree. Now: vision models can SEE. A customer videos the tree, a maps API tells the machine exactly where and roughly what it is, a prompt does the analysis — and the tree gets quoted without anyone leaving the yard. That's a real product, in YOUR industry, that only someone who knows trees could build right.

Cake baker with great recipes? AI cuts your clips now — I've just started using it for video editing and it's genuinely fucking good. Different niche, same rule: the machine amplifies the thing you already know.

Even $500k and an agent won't save you

Push it to the extreme: hand AI half a million dollars and say "go make me money." It won't. You'd need to grant permissions and remove guardrails — which you'd need to understand. You'd need to build the agent — which you'd need to learn. And above all you'd need to feed it a strategy: if you're a proven trader who reads candlesticks, you could wire an agent to TradingView, give it your swing rules, and let it think and execute inside them. The agent runs the strategy. The strategy is your experience. If it were easier than that, everyone would already be doing it.

The real goal: use AI to grow

Anyone stuck on "how do I make money with AI" won't make any — because the goal is wrong. Use AI to grow. They say AI will make people dumber; mate, if you're dumb as fuck it should make you smarter — there's no way you can get any dumber. I'm street smart, not book smart, and I've used this thing to learn what I always actually wanted: how to code. Now I consult on it, and I'm coding serious shit — including the website you're reading this on. That habit — ask, build, ship, repeat — is the entire foundation, and teaching it is exactly what the ten-dollar Foundation Ten exists for.