How to actually use AI to make money in 2026

Two out of every hundred people are building something with AI. The other 98 are typing questions into it. The gap isn't the tool. You make money with AI by handing it one job you're already good at and hate doing, documented well enough that it can repeat you without you in the room.

Two out of every hundred people are producing. The rest are Googling.

I was in the 98 for a long time and thought I was crushing it. ChatGPT open all day, good questions in, decent answers back, and not one number in my business moved. Then I spent north of 100 hours in two weeks learning the other way to use it. The difference isn't twice as fast. It's a knife versus a chainsaw on the same tree.

What separates the two groups is not the tool. Downloading Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot does nothing by itself. AI is only as good as what you put into it, and a thin foundation just gets multiplied. Two things have to be settled before you build anything: what you're handing off, and where the AI's brain comes from.

Most people skip both and build whatever sounded fun that morning, then end up with ten half-finished tools and no number that moved.

Every agent pulls its brain from one of four places

Every human employee and every AI agent pulls its expertise from somewhere. There are exactly four sources, and one is useless until you fix it.

Type	What it means	Can AI use it?	What to do with it
Undocumented	You've done it a thousand times and it lives in your gut, written down nowhere	No	Where almost everybody is. The next three sections get you out
Documented	Same expertise, in words: Looms, voice notes, Zoom recordings, email threads, old SOPs	Yes	Feed it in raw. Your thinking on a page is the asset
Borrowed	Someone else is the expert and has published a hundred hours of how they do it	Yes	The foundation for anything you don't know how to do
Synthesized	Borrowed expertise combined with yours, or several experts with each other	Yes, best of the four	Where the output stops sounding like a clone of someone else

Borrowed is the one people misuse. When I want something built around a skill I don't have, I find the person who is genuinely top 1% at it and build on the hundred-plus hours they've already published. What most people do instead is type "build me an agent that writes short-form content" into a chat window. Bad input, bad output, every time.

Synthesized is my favorite. Everything Alex Hormozi has published on offers, everything Russell Brunson has on funnels, everything Kallaway has on hooks, combined with my own way of doing things. None of them alone covers what I want. Together they do. Borrow without layering in your own voice, though, and you've built a clone of a stranger. The 12 prompts I use are all built this way.

Documented is the one that matters most to your bank account, because it's yours and nobody else has it. The AI tools in a Course Creator 360 account are the shortcut for the borrowed half: the course-selling job is already documented inside them, so your market research, curriculum, offer and first funnel come back written for someone who sells what they know.

Point it at the work you're great at and quietly hate

Not every task deserves an agent. Sort your work by how good you are at it and how much you enjoy it. The winner is always the corner where you're the expert and get no joy from it. Your expertise is highest there and your attachment is lowest, so you'll hand it over and still know whether the output is any good.

I asked about a hundred course creators on one of our live coaching calls which corner they'd automate first. Roughly two thirds picked the work they're bad at and hate. It's the worst possible start. Without the expertise you can't judge whether AI or a human did a good job, so you fly blind and rewrite everything by hand anyway.

Inside that corner, two filters set the order: how much revenue honestly traces back to the task, and how many hours a week it takes from you personally. Start where both are high. Mine are customer support email and managing my team. Writing marketing email qualifies too, because I've written thousands of them, made millions of dollars from them, and find the job a chore. Redesigning my own website is fun and drives nothing, so it waits.

Why McDonald's fries taste the same in Tokyo and in Utah

You can walk into a McDonald's in Tokyo, in Saudi Arabia or in Utah and the fries are identical. Same taste, same smell, same look. That isn't talent, because they hire 12-year-olds and 50-year-olds and get the same tray either way. They documented every variable: oil temperature, grams of salt, fry time down to the second, how long the fries sit before they go in the bag.

That's the standard for what you hand an agent: enough detail that it repeats you without you checking every run. AI is far better at pattern recognition than any human, and it can only recognize patterns you give it.

Here's where people blow it. They open a Google Doc and type the process from memory. Step one, step two, step three. From memory you lose the logic, the exceptions and the small rules that make the process work. I learned that the expensive way with humans first. I've hired hundreds of employees and spent years thinking my people were the problem. Bad delegation is just bad documentation.

The same gap shows up on our onboarding calls: a real business in someone's head and nothing an outside brain could read. That call is included on Premium and Elite, and half of what it does is pull the setup out of your head into something that runs, starting with your domain, DNS and email deliverability. Book a walkthrough if you want to see it first.

Record it three times, because once is a fluke

This is the part that makes the rest work, and the part everybody wants to skip. I call it the 3X Loom process. Use Loom, a phone voice memo, any recorder that gives you a transcript, and film yourself doing the task while narrating every decision out loud.

Not the summary. The actual reasoning. "This is an invoice from Amazon, I file those here. This one is spam and here's how I can tell. When I get an email from Mark I reply like this." You'll feel like an idiot the first time, which is how you know you're doing it right. Fifteen minutes of email takes about an hour when you narrate it. That hour is the whole price of admission.

Then the rule that names the process. Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern. Do it three separate times over a couple of days, because session one won't cover everything. Session two catches ten more edge cases and session three catches ten more, so by the third pass you have roughly 95% of the nuance. That's where an agent stops needing you.

You don't write the process document. You hand the three transcripts to AI and it writes it. If you'd rather build that same brain by typing instead of talking, here's the 10-minute written version.

What came out the other side: an inbox agent and a hiring bot

I ran this exact process on my email. Three Looms of me clearing my inbox, into Claude Code, out came an SOP, and now an agent wakes up and clears my inbox to my preferences. It saves about 15 minutes a day, which is a week and a half of my year.

The second one mattered more. I was too involved in hiring my video editors, so I built a Discord bot that meets an editor coming in from onlinejobs.ph, asks my qualifying questions, hands over the onboarding docs and collects payment details. I woke up one morning to four editors already vetted. Three didn't qualify, and each would have cost me 10 to 15 minutes personally to find that out.

I have zero coding experience. A couple of months before I built those, I didn't know what Claude Code was. You talk to it in your own language and give it your documentation. Building was never the hard part. Documenting is.

An agent that writes something still has to have somewhere to send it

Here's the honest limit, and it's the one that keeps people busy and broke. An agent that writes your emails produces a document, and a document has never made anybody a dollar. Something has to hold your course, take the payment, deliver the freebie, send the sequence on a schedule, tag who opened what and pull buyers out of the follow-up the second they pay.

People tell me on demo calls that they asked AI for an all-in-one and got handed nine separate tools to stitch together. That's the tax on running a business out of a chat window: the writing gets instant and the shipping stays as slow as it was. What members want is the system running itself while they go do the work they're good at, and no prompt does that alone.

Deliverability is the version that costs the most, because it's invisible. Your agent can write the best 50-email sequence of your life and land in spam because your sending domain was never authenticated. Premium is $147 a month as of September 2026 with a 30-day trial, and includes unlimited email plus that setup call. Here are the plans, and if you'd rather not build it yourself, our Experts do the build.

The org chart I'm building, and the one job you should start with

Where this goes for me is an actual company. One CEO agent I talk to, and under it six or seven C-level agents: marketing, product, finance, chief of staff, technology, customer. Each one holds its own second brain of how I think, so my marketing agent knows my hooks and my scripts while my chief of staff runs my inbox. I'm early in this and no expert at it. If I can build it, most people reading this can.

You don't start there. You start with one task, this week. Write down everything you did today and yesterday, circle the thing you're genuinely good at, don't enjoy, that eats hours and touches money, and record yourself doing it three times. That's your first agent, and it took an afternoon.

Then give what it produces somewhere to live. I've sold or helped sell $25 million of online courses and just shy of $8 million of my own software, and the pattern never changed: the money shows up when the work reaches a customer. Take the 30-day free trial and bring your new documents. Courses aren't going anywhere either, and here's which ones survive this.

Frequently asked questions

Which AI tool should I use to build agents?

I use Claude Code and like it, but Cursor and the others do the same job. The tool is not your bottleneck. Someone with a great process document and a mediocre tool beats someone with the best tool and nothing written down.

How long before this actually saves me time?

Three recording sessions over a couple of days, plus an afternoon of building. My email agent took roughly that and saves 15 minutes a day. A few hours once, and you get the time back every week for as long as the business runs.

Do I need to know how to code?

No. I have zero coding experience and I didn't know what Claude Code was a couple of months before I built my first agent. You describe what you want in plain language and hand over your documentation. The skill is knowing what you want, which people mistake for the easy part.

Can I borrow someone else's prompts instead of documenting my own way of working?

For anything you're not the expert in, borrow shamelessly from people who published how they do it. For the work you're actually good at, borrowing gets you a clone of a stranger. Your documented process is the one input nobody else on the internet has.

Is any of this worth it for a one-person business?

It's worth more. A team of ten absorbs a bad process. A team of one can't, and every hour you get back is an hour you can spend selling. The first agent I built was for a job nobody else in my company was ever going to do.

What should I automate first inside Course Creator 360?

Your follow-up. The emails after someone downloads your freebie, the reminders before a call, the tagging when they buy, and the sequence that keeps running while you're filming. Those come from templates in your account and they run without you, which is the same win as an agent for a fraction of the work. Start there on the trial.

Related

• The 12 Best AI Prompts for Course Creators
• How to Train AI on Your Business in 10 Minutes
• Which Online Courses Still Sell Now That AI Exists