Make money with AI: 20 AI side hustle ideas

AI has been one of the biggest technological revelations of the last couple of years, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. While the dangers of AI going unchecked are much talked about, and indeed the current iteration of the technology displays major challenges especially in the area of intellectual property protection, there’s no arguing that it’s an area of infinite opportunity.

Many early adopters of AI have already started unlocking these opportunities, so it’s about time you started to do the same.

But how can you use AI to generate revenue, and what kinds of business models can AI allow you to take advantage of? Read on to find out!

Wondering how to make money with AI?

We need to acknowledge that one of the best and certainly most reliable ways to make money with AI is to actually work in the field full-time, and given that it’s such a high-potential area the salaries on offer can be mouth-watering. That being said, you don’t need to fret if you’re not a developer or software engineer because some AI side hustles can be even more lucrative!

Entrepreneurs the world over who have taken the time to understand the applications of AI are putting it to use, leveraging the power of AI and harnessing its ability to get tasks done quickly and efficiently.

True creativity remains the province of humans, so all you need is an idea and an understanding of how to get AI to execute on your behalf, developing revenue streams in minutes that would otherwise take you weeks to build from scratch.

20 AI side hustle ideas

So, what are some examples of side hustles that AI can help you create and then monetize? Let’s dive right in.

1. Prompt engineering

Using generative AI tools is all about learning how the program responds to prompts, and getting the most out of popular tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney is purely a matter of creating the right prompts. As you may imagine, making AI dance to your tune can take some research as well as trial and error, but once you’re able to master the art of prompting AI, you’ve got a skill that’s suddenly very much in demand.

With your new-found expertise in prompt engineering, you can either look to monetize your prompts on prompt marketplaces or sell your skills to companies turning to AI on a full time or freelance basis. It’s arguable that prompt engineering might not be a gig with really long-term prospects, but you can definitely make money in the short term, and you’ll have a leg up on the competition in terms of understanding the sort of inputs that AI tools work best with.

Tools Needed: Generative AI such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney

Monetization: Sell prompts on marketplaces or freelance for software firms

2. AI services

If you know your way around AI, you can take things a step further from prompt engineering and use AI to perform various services. Not every business can afford an in-house AI expert, so you’ll find that a lot of companies are heading to freelancer and gig sites to look for people to fulfill services using AI for them.

While AI can’t actually replace an employee in the majority of cases (more on that in a moment), it can help to take over certain tasks and automate tasks that are more effort than brainpower. For instance, AI can take on content editing very well since it just has to follow certain rules, and if you’re able to harness different plug-ins and utilities you’ll find that you can offer some pretty advanced services on AI.

For example, you could use a tool like ChatGPT with different plugins and its Code Interpreter mode to do calculations and process spreadsheets as input and input. If that sounds like ChatGPT could automate a lot of middle management jobs, well, you might be right—and it could be a service you choose to offer.

AI services are really hot right now, and freelancing marketplace Upwork features it as one of its top 4 gig categories.

Tools Needed: You’ll need a deep understanding of AI utilities such as ChatGPT

Monetization: List your services on digital marketplaces or freelancing sites

3. AI consultant

Going one step further from simply offering AI services to help companies and their employees automate different tasks, you could bring your knowledge of and expertise in the world of AI to clients in a further-reaching, more lucrative package.

Many firms today are exploring the possibilities of AI and the opportunities the technology can create, but many don’t have the manpower or expertise to do so. That’s where you come in, and you do so with your broad knowledge of AI in tow. Rather than getting good and using AI to solve specific problems, a role like this entails the ability to assess a company’s processes and being able to prescribe the right tools for the job.

One of the advantages of being in a gig like this is the fact that you’ll be right at the forefront of AI development, and it’s up to you to learn about the different AI tools and services popping up from one day to the next. That way, you can make sure that your clients are served in the best, most efficient possible manner.

And as a consultant, you can charge a pretty penny, too.

Tools Needed: Knowledge of the industry and different tools out there rather than any one specific tool

Monetization: Build your brand through content and professional networking sites like LinkedIn to acquire clients, and use platforms like Whop to build your consultant business

4. Print on Demand

Print on Demand (POD) is an extremely popular online business model, and it can be very profitable if done right. One of the main challenges with POD is creating designs that will sell, which is why a lot of the POD businesses you’ll see out there are tied to an established name or message—for example, your favorite influencer probably sells their own merch via POD, and people buy it because it carries that influencer’s brand or message.

Another way to do this is by employing AI in the design process. It’s hard to go wrong here since all your generative AI has to do is come up with some attractive graphics for the printable you choose. Whether that’s the cover for a journal, an image for a tee shirt or a couple of choice words for a mug, AI can help you come up with a few mock designs that you can take through to your suppliers.

Tools Needed: Generative AI tools like Midjourney to design prints, ChatGPT for slogans. You can also use AI-powered design software like Vexels if you want a premium option and more POD-specific functionality

Monetization: List your products on online ecommerce sites

5. Digital printables

If you like the idea of creating prints using AI but don’t want to set up the supply chain and fulfillment required for a business model like POD, you could choose to sell digital printables instead. These are simply digital products that customers can purchase and then print for themselves.

The work required to make this happen is therefore far less on your behalf, and all you’ll really need to make sure of is that the printing process works fine on the customer end. Besides that it’s a matter of marketing and promotion, and making sure that you can find your audience. Influencers and big personalities have an edge here since they already have an audience ready to go, but some effective consumer research should see you on your way.

The number and types of products you can sell as digital printables may also surprise you. From static objects like calendars and wall art to interactive, useful items like coloring books for children and adults alike, AI can help you get them all mocked up in a flash. Use Midjourney or even use the AI feature in Canva.

Once you have them ready to go, you can sell them on your own website or on a platform specializing in digital products like Whop.

Tools Needed: AI tools like Midjourney, Canva (with AI turned on), and ChatGPT

Monetization: List your printable products on a platform like Whop where your customers can purchase and download them with ease

6. 3D modeling

Staying with the use of AI to aid in design, you can also turn different AI tools toward 3D modeling via a text prompt. This is a big one, since 3D design is rarified air when it comes to difficulty—not too many people have the skills and expertise required to do this, let alone produce the quantity of designs you may need to turn it into a viable business or side hustle.

What you actually do with the 3D models is up to you. Tabletop gaming miniatures could be a profitable area if you’re aware of what you can and can’t do from a licensing perspective, and you could set yourself up to design and print pieces for up-and-coming board game designers.

Text to 3D is still an emerging area, and Dreamfusion is one of the best options out there currently. It’s still in development, but as the technology matures you’ll be able to do more and more with it!

Tools Needed: Text to 3D AI tools like Dreamfusion

Monetization: Either create bespoke 3D designs as a freelancer or set up your own 3D printing business

7. Sell PLR digital products

Private Label Rights digital products are digital products that are created by someone and then distributed by a second party, with the latter holding all claim to branding and intellectual property. It’s a good way for businesses to leverage their reach and outsource design and product development, with individual creators being paid very well for their efforts.

This is a business model that works in the world of physical products, but it’s especially lucrative in the digital world because digital products can be infinitely duplicated and don’t need much in the way of storage. They’re also easy to edit if the distributing party wants to make changes to the digital product in question.

So, where does AI come in? Well, creating digital products is something that AI can do quite well if you’re good at taking the reins. With the right tools of choice and prompt engineering expertise, you might be able to create digital products in minutes rather than the hours, days, or even weeks it might take to produce them from scratch.

Tools Needed: Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney are the standard although it depends fully on what sort of digital products you decide to create

Monetization: Sell your PLR digital products to bigger brands or influencers within the same niche

8. Coding

You might suggest that coding is nothing but the way a human interfaces with a computer and gets it to do what you want it to, which means that AI should logically be able to play a big role in this area. And, it does, with a wide variety of tools out there today that can help you complete programming tasks of all kinds.

In fact, AI coding tools are becoming standard practice in the development industry already, helping to enhance productivity and accuracy, translating between programming languages, finding code snippets, and even auto-generating documentation.

AI coding tools aren’t quite there when it comes to being completely safe—studies have found that software engineers who use AI tools are more likely to see security vulnerabilities. This means that you probably shouldn’t trust AI to get all of your coding done blindly, but rather use it strategically to pad out and make your own work more efficient.

That being said, developments such as OpenAI’s o1 and GitHub’s Copilot can make coding a breeze. The former is even better than OpenAI’s previous models, and the latter uses publicly available code from existing repositories to access large datasets and quickly develop code. It even detects errors and recommends changes, and can be used as an extension.

Tools Needed: GitHub’s Copilot is one of the best, but OpenAI’s o1 is also very worth a look

Monetization: Sell your coding skills as a freelancer and tackle paid programming tasks

9. Chatbot development

Chatbots have been around for ages, to the point now that it’s almost impossible to get human customer support contact on some of the biggest names in online business. That being said, just about every small business also already uses or wants to use a chatbot on their website, which then starts to open up an opportunity for anyone with development chops.

Pair that with the trend of companies integrating chatbots with different social media platforms and the need for improved conversations and more sophisticated functionality from chatbots, and you’re talking about AI-driven chatbots.

So, learning how to develop robust AI chatbots could be a huge opportunity with a practically never-ending list of potential clients out there. Sure, the bigger companies have already invested in this sort of thing, but not everyone has cracked the code—there have been a few stories of people tricking AI chatbots and getting free stuff already.

Now, that sort of thing could actually be worth heaps in free publicity, but not if your chatbot is going to get exploited all the time. Match safety and an absence of loopholes with effective and empathetic design with an emphasis on the user experience, and you’re onto a winner.

Tools Needed: AI coding utilities such as GPT o1-mini or Copilot, although assistants like Claude could also help. You’ll also want to look into chatbot frameworks such as Microsoft Bot Framework or Rasa

Monetization: Design and sell AI-powered chatbots to firms as software

10. AI trading bots

Trading bots are another type of software that have been around for a while, but the advent of AI could really shake up what’s on offer. Quite simply, AI has several advantages over the traditional algorithmic trading system—the amount of information it can process, the variety of activities it can perform, and machine learning.

The financial markets are all about data, and information comes in hard and fast during a trading day. An AI-powered bot is more capable of crunching all of this data in real time, and accounting for more than just a limited set of variables. It can also perform all of the different computations that you would want to carry out, and monitor their results while also retaining a broader perspective of what’s happening.

Machine learning can also help the trading bot to analyze data patterns and draw inferences from them, adapting to changing market conditions and responding to opportunities or threats without explicitly being told to.

If you’ve got the skill and knowledge in the world of AI and an understanding of today’s financial markets, you can marry the two to significant effect, figuratively selling those gold miners the smartest and most effective picks and shovels they could dream of having.

Tools Needed: AI coding utilities such as the ones previously mentioned

Monetization: Get listed on Whop’s trading page and sell your AI trading bot there

11. SaaS

It should come as no surprise that the SaaS industry is already very much in bed with AI. Software-as-a-Service is a revolutionary business model that has allowed firms an unprecedented level of growth and scale, and some of the biggest names in SaaS are now very much part of our professional lives.

Zoom, for instance, is ubiquitous—and utilizes AI to improve video quality and cut down on background noise within video calls. Slack’s AI-infused chatbot, Slackbot, handles all manner of repetitive tasks. DocuSign uses AI to do its thing better and safer, Zendesk boosts response times with AI, and Oracle has improved threat detection with AI too.

Given just how entrenched AI is in the top SaaS names, there are several opportunities here. Firstly, you could scroll back up to some of the previous entries on this list and see if your AI skills and knowledge are a match for the SaaS industry.

Secondly, given how much time and effort AI saves in the coding and development process, your own SaaS startup could be that much closer to reality. If you’ve got an idea or an opportunity you want to explore, AI can make it much faster to develop an MVP and also integrate with the end product to make a much more polished, user-friendly service.

If you think developing an entire SaaS project or app using AI is a bit of a reach, just check out Blake Anderson’s story. Spoiler alert, the sum of money involved in the tale is truly mind blowing.

Tools Needed: Depends on what opportunity you intend to explore

Monetization: Bootstrap your own SaaS venture and develop it quickly using AI, either as a standalone service or for other companies to enhance their own products or productivity

12. Sell AI courses

There are two side-hustles here—first of all, you can teach courses in AI once you develop the skills to actually make a side hustle out of any of the previous ideas. Once you gain this sort of understanding of AI and prompt creation, you’ll find that plenty of people out there are hungry to learn those same skills. Why not transfer your knowledge on to them, for a price?

Secondly, you can also enlist AI to aid you in actually creating courses. Regardless of what the subject matter is, certain AI tools can help you structure and edit your course, while others can help with touching up and graphics. You can also get simple animations and text-to-speech done for small instructional videos via AI, meaning that your actual workload is reduced and your courses pay a whole lot more compared to how much they cost to build.

Tools Needed: ChatGPT for brainstorming and course structure, Midjourney for design and Descript to create videos

Monetization: Sell your courses on digital marketplaces like Whop

13. Resume writing

If you’ve ever been a job seeker or studied the job market, you’ll know that most companies employ programs to screen and filter out resumes that don’t fit certain criteria, or in some cases just don’t contain the right keyword. The situation isn’t terribly fair on job seekers, some of whom just don’t know how to work the system, and most of whom spend an inordinate amount of time and money on applications just to have them thrown out without reaching human eyes.

So, why not step in and use your AI superpowers to help? There are specialized AI tools like Novoresume that’ll do the job, but even good ‘ol ChatGPT can be given a job listing and a candidate’s basic resume as inputs, and spit out a tailored resume as an output in a matter of seconds.

The more advanced AI tools will also use the right templates and formats for the task, ensuring that the resume readers used by hiring firms can process everything properly—yes, that’s right, some job seekers even lose out because they put key text in the wrong column.

You can now offer your AI-powered resume-writing services on any online gig platform or freelancer marketplace and expect to charge up to three figures a pop, depending on the sort of jobs people are looking at.

Tools Needed: ChatGPT for basic resume generation, tools like Novoresume if you want to take it to the next level

Monetization: Sell your resume writing and optimization services on freelancer marketplaces

14. Websites and landing pages

Websites and landing pages are central to ecommerce, which is not going anywhere as we move into 2025—in fact, ecommerce revenue is projected to hit a full quarter of total global sales activity in 2025, with US ecommerce sales expected to grow at around 8% CAGR through the decade.

Given this rate of growth, the demand for web design services is highly unlikely to fall. There are already a bunch of services that offer quick and easy building of basic web and landing pages, but for businesses and entrepreneurs who want to go the extra mile, there’s you.

Templates are a good place to start before graduating to bespoke web design services once you accumulate a client base, with AI to help you scale—you can whip up inspirations, alter them, and even embellish them just the way you want in minutes with the AI tools out there today, so say goodbye to hours’ and hours’ worth of work per job.

Tools Needed: Canva, Midjourney, and other design-based AI utilities

Monetization: List templates on digital marketplaces before starting a web design business on Whop

15. Stock images

Stock images have usually been the province of both professional and enthusiast photographers, but some stock image repositories and websites have started opening their doors to AI-generated content.

It’s worth remembering that by selling AI-generated art on a platform like this you’re opening yourself up to liability if you cross certain boundaries, so it’s wise to stay clear of copying other work—one of the issues with AI is its ability to imitate the style of an artists if you input that into the prompt, so just stay clear of that and you’ll be fine.

When selling stock AI art, the understanding is clear on all sides that it’s AI generated, so don’t expect to sell pieces for lots of money. It’s going to be a matter of quantity rather than quality since the only real expenditure of effort is typing in a prompt. That said, you can do various things to increase your chances of scoring sales, such as researching the platform’s recent best sellers.

Tools Needed: Image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney, with the latter being most creators’ tool of choice

Monetization: Sell your stock AI generations on platforms like Adobe Stock which allow AI-generated art. Some platforms, including Adobe Stock, also have their own image generators

16. Content marketing

If you’ve already got another revenue stream or side hustle, such as content creation or ecommerce, it’s probable that you already have a website. Now, one of the best ways to grow a business is through content marketing, and since it’s your own business, you can leverage as much AI as you want to generate content for that brand.

That said, while it is certainly possible to generate entire blog posts and even videos using various AI tools, you may not see perfect results if you rely solely on AI. Google has a policy of rewarding high-quality content, ranking content that demonstrates expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness highly—and purely AI generated content will demonstrate none of these.

So, you can use AI to generate structures for your web pages or blog posts, and even drop in lots of information before you go in and edit it, lending the content your own voice. Or do things the other way around, drafting all of the content before AI takes over the editing. Let AI save you time, but don’t rely on it to do everything for you if you want the best results.

Tools Needed: Text generation tools such as ChatGPT and Jasper

Monetization: Indirectly boost your revenue via content marketing, and gain more sales from your site by ranking higher in search.

17. AI-generated newsletters

If you didn’t already know it, newsletters are one of the hottest new sources of revenue out there today. Previously considered just a marketing tool, creators and businesses alike are using newsletters for a lot more than just that, and premium newsletters can generate millions from subscription fees alone.

So, why not allow AI to create your newsletters for you? There are AI newsletter generators out there today that scan for whatever content is out there in a given niche, then include the most relevant of it into your mail. They can then learn about user preferences as they go to start adapting content to suit certain audiences, and require minimum input from you.

You’ll need to play your part on the editing side of things to ensure that your readers are actually gaining the value you want to give them from your newsletter, of course, but the time investment pales in comparison to writing and compiling the whole thing yourself.

Tools Needed: CleverReach and Piktochart AI are specialist tools for newsletter content generation, but many LLM’s can get the job done in a pinch

Monetization: Either release a free newsletter and direct readers to your other digital products, sell ad space, or charge a subscription fee for your newsletter

18. Faceless YouTube videos

We covered some of the caveats of this in the previous idea, and the concept holds—any sort of content creation you do with AI should have your voice, lest it probably isn’t going to do too well. That being said, there are certain popular forms of content that some creators are leaving completely to AI and profiting from.

Faceless YouTube channels, for example, are surprisingly prevalent. It’s possible to deploy a cocktail of AI tools toward this—let Jasper write the script, then feed that into Fliki or Lumen5 to get a video that you can tweak. In fact, there are lots of AI tools that perform the various functions you would need, to the point that you have to do almost no work through the entire process, and can earn money on YouTube by uploading these videos consistently.

We’re not denying that this could be a solid side hustle, but the content generated in this manner tends to be much ado about nothing—the actual value added is close to nil, and you’ll have to work extra hard to monetize the sort of audience you’ll gain if in fact you do manage to attract a following with this sort of content.

There’s also the clear and present risk that YouTube adopts policies akin to its parent company and cracks down on this sort of content, and in the longer term, you might open yourself up to liability in the future thanks to how AI generates content—OpenAI is already in court for allegedly stealing copyrighted works, and the regulatory future around the industry is likely to change fast.

So, whatever sort of content you’d like to create, by all means let AI help you—you can create cover art for your eBook with Midjourney, edit your videos with Descript, and use ChatGPT to brainstorm content, but do keep ethics and regulations in mind as you go.

Tools Needed: Jasper can help you create scripts and structure stories, ChatGPT is great for brainstorming, Synthesia can add voice to text you write, InVideo can suggest stock video for your script, and Descript makes editing easy.

Monetization: Generate platform revenue with services like TikTok and YouTube, and monetize your community through further side hustles as well as subscriptions and memberships with Whop

19. Faceless TikTok videos

Much like faceless YouTube videos, faceless TikToks are also a thing. Arguably, they might be an even safer bet as a way to make money with AI since, as a platform, TikTok isn’t quite as stringent as YouTube’s parent company Google.

The how-to for a faceless TikTok is much the same as with YouTube. A smart text-generating AI tool can do up the script for you, and then it’s about running it through a video generation AI like Fliki to conjure up some visuals to go with your script. Then, a text-to-speech AI like ElevenLabs can take care of the audio side of things, before you finally put it all together with an AI-enhanced video editor like Descript.

Doing faceless and either mostly or even fully AI-generated videos on TikTok might be an even better bet than on other platforms, since the way users interact with it is quite unique. AI can definitely help you to catch them at first glance, and then the message of your video can take over. You’re catching viewers with their guard down, whereas with platforms like YouTube you’ve got to really compete for attention and appeal to their intelligence.

Tools Needed: There are plenty that can get the job done, but for example a combination of Jasper, Fliki, ElevenLabs and Descript can get an entire video project done from scratch

Monetization: Check out this guide to monetizing TikTok content

20. Transcription

Transcription is usually a freelance gig offered by, for example, researchers who have conducted a large number of interviews but don’t have enough (or any) assistants to convert all of that speech into text. And it’s not just the sciences—companies are doing lots of the same stuff, and don’t always have enough interns for the job!

Hence freelance transcription, but thanks to AI the job can get a whole lot easier. There are a variety of AI tools that do text-to-speech really well, and while they’re not perfect, a single pass by a human is all that’s usually required to have a final, clean version.

Descript, which we’ve mentioned as a video editing AI, actually does transcription as a first step. If you record using it, it transcribes whatever you say and then allows you to edit video via the script. The same goes with importing audio—the AI will transcribe it, so you can even make a nice, cleaned-up and enhanced version of the recording once you’re done transcribing.

That being said, there are also a few specialist transcription AI’s out there too. Whisper is well known as an accurate option for Mac users, TurboScribe can help you transcribe fast at very low cost, and Notta tends to be a good option for transcribing group conversations like meetings and focus groups since it has speaker identification.

Tools Needed: Transcription AI like Whisper, Notta, or TurboScribe although a more versatile option like Descript works too

Monetization: Offer transcription services on freelancing platforms or via your own site

Looking for more ways to make money?

There are tons of ways to make money on the internet, and AI is adding another leg to the game by giving you tools to work with, letting you do things you couldn’t before as well as opening up brand new opportunities that didn’t exist previously.

To learn more about how you can make life easier and unlock some of these learning opportunities, remember to check out Whop—there are some fantastic educators on the marketplace ready to share even more ideas or help you flesh out your own into a money-making side hustle.

And once you’re ready to sell your thing, list it on Whop. Whether you’re looking to monetize the community of your AI-enhanced YouTube channel, sell eBooks, courses, or digital printable, Whop offers the digital fulfillment infrastructure and all requisite services you need to rock your new business.

Check Out Whop Today