9 Ways to Make Money With AI (2025)

Revenue in the artificial intelligence (AI) market could hit US$126 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. That’s a huge piece of the global market. For entrepreneurs and small businesses, it means there are plenty of opportunities to earn money with AI services. 

Thanks to AI’s tremendous practical abilities, you can perform tasks with speed, accuracy, and efficiency. And while there’s talk about the technology displacing some jobs, it’s already creating entirely new ones—and income-generating streams, too. 

Wondering how to get your slice of the pie? This guide explores 8 ways to make money with AI—each is a proven strategy to earn some extra cash.

ChatGPT’s public release kicked off a wave of interest in AI. Since then, AI models are part of many people’s everyday lives, helping them save time at work, know how to do things, and make money. Below, we explore 9 creative and proven ways to make money with AI—no matter your skill level— and how to do so.

1. Scale Your Freelance Business with AI on Fiverr Go

Fiverr Go offers freelancers a powerful way to scale their businesses with AI while keeping their unique creative touch. By training AI Creation Models, freelancers can generate content in their own style, allowing them to work faster without compromising quality. This means more projects, higher earnings, and a seamless blend of AI efficiency and human creativity.

The ability to generate instant deliverables while fine-tuning AI outputs helps freelancers meet tight deadlines. With AI handling the bulk of the work, freelancers can take on more clients and maximize revenue. Clients get the speed of AI with the expertise of a professional, creating a win-win situation.

Fiverr Go’s Personal Assistant changes how to automate client interactions. It can answer common questions, gather project details, and help close deals faster. This allows freelancers to focus on high-value tasks while ensuring clients receive quick, consistent responses.

For passive income, AI Creation Models enable freelancers to generate and sell content at scale. Once trained, these models can produce work for multiple clients with minimal manual effort. This opens up opportunities to sell pre-made assets or license AI-generated content.

Freelancers using Fiverr Go also benefit from strong protections over their AI models. Content remains watermarked until purchased, ensuring they get paid for their work. This guarantees that AI enhances creativity rather than exploiting it.

💡 Pro Tip: Train your AI model with high-quality work to improve accuracy and maintain your creative identity. A well-trained model leads to better results, satisfied clients, and repeat business.

2. Create digital products

Digital products, like pricing calculators, craft patterns, digital textiles, sound effects, clip art packs, digital courses, and ready-to-use templates, are a hassle-free and inexpensive income stream with minimal costs. 

Once you know your target audience's needs, use AI content creation tools to create your digital product. Depending on your audience's needs, you can create as many digital products as you want and sell them multiple times on marketplaces like Etsy, Gumroad, Podia, or your own website and app. Price them affordably to encourage sales. 

Ann Koppuzha, founder of Powerhouse Legal Strategy—an online legal advisory for creatives and entrepreneurs—shares how AI tools help her craft legal contracts for her clients:

“I use AI tools, like ChatGPT, to craft legal contracts, and for my digital strategy services and legal strategy business,” says Koppuzha. “I largely provide the input and have ChatGPT polish my input, then sell my AI-drafted contract templates on my online shop, The Business Reserve, to creative business owners like web designers. So far, I’ve made a few thousand dollars selling these contract templates.”

Tools and services to use: ChatGPT, Clickup, Writer, Notion

💡Pro tip: Use a poll, survey, or email to find your audience’s pain points and build useful, relatable, affordable, and easy-to-use templates that solve them. 

3. Offer AI marketing and advertising services

AI has seeped into almost every area of marketing. Sprout Social’s 2023 Index shows 81% of marketers say AI has positively impacted their work, while 73% report a positive impact on productivity. 

AI marketing tools can handle marketing tasks and workflows for lead generation, customer personalization, data analytics, and more. If you offer digital marketing services, for instance, AI tools can analyze user data and automate ad creation, placement, and scheduling. You can also use AI to create personalized email messages that improve conversions and upsell to your subscribers.    

Kate Ross, a beauty specialist at IrresistibleMe—a hair ecommerce company—uses AI tools to generate marketing insights for customer personalization.

“AI helps us understand our customers better and sell more effectively,” says Ross. “We can predict what our customers want and answer their questions quickly through chatbots. We also rely on these tools to analyze data, talk to our customers, and sell more products.”

Other ways to make money using AI-powered marketing tools include identifying trending products for affiliate marketing, creating AI chatbots for lead generation or customer service, or creating ad campaigns for your customers.

Tools and services to use: Optimove, Tidio, Mailchimp, Seventh Sense, Zapier

💡Pro tip: Feed the AI marketing tool with user-generated content (UGC), like video or photos from your current customers, to eliminate the cold, robotic feel in your AI-powered marketing or advertising. 

📚Read: 30+ AI content marketing tools to level up your strategy in 2024 

4. Start an AI self-publishing business

Under the traditional publishing model, you had to put months or years of work into a manuscript, and there was no guarantee that your work would be published. 

Thanks to AI, you can create and sell self-published books and earn royalties, too. AI tools speed up the outlining and writing process, so you can start your publishing journey ASAP. 

Identify a good niche, then use AI to generate story ideas and book covers. Some examples of books you can self-publish include word puzzles, coloring books, activity books, novels, how-to guides, and more. Publish the books in different formats, like ebooks or audiobooks, and sell through your website or marketplaces, like Amazon or Apple Books.

See how AI educator Alamin uses ChatGPT and DALLE-3 to create children’s coloring books and sell them on Amazon KDP.

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Tim Boucher, an AI artist and author, started his self-publishing business armed only with his imagination and AI tools, like ChatGPT, DALLE, and Midjourney. Boucher crafts unique, captivating ebooks and AI-generated images, then sells them on Gumroad for $1.99 to $3.99.

Gumroad

Tools and services to use: ChatGPT, DALL-E, Canva, Publishing.AI, Hemingway AI

💡Pro tip: Offer free content, like a guide or sample, to build trust with your community and gauge their interest. Then, create a series of books to diversify your product offering and earn revenue from more than one book, or bundle them together for a great price.

📚Read: AI for Small Business: The Key to Rapid Growth for SMBs 

5. Make a virtual influencer

An AI influencer can resemble real people and promote a brand, product, or service on social media platforms. Sprout Social’s 2024 Influencer Marketing report shows 37% of consumers would be more interested in a brand that uses an AI influencer, making these virtual influencers useful for connecting with consumers. 

For example, Ruben Cruz, founder of The Clueless agency, created Aitana, an AI influencer who acts as a model for the agency’s clients and generates an average of around €3,000 a month.  

Instagram

To create an AI influencer, define your target audience, craft an ideal persona, and develop a backstory, visual style, and personality traits for the character. Then, use AI tools with lifelike 3D avatars and augmented reality (AR) effects to create images of your influencer in various settings.

You can use your AI influencer to sell merchandise, like t-shirts, shoes, or branded items, digital products, exclusive content, sponsored posts, and more.

Tools and services to use: Brud, Neon, Imma, Spark AR, Blender, Zepeto

💡Pro tip: Program your AI influencer to speak different languages and adapt their cultural references so it can connect with audiences across geographical regions.

 6. Design and build apps and websites

AI AI development software can design and build a website or write code to power a software application for your clients, saving you time, resources, and effort.

Making an AI-generated website or app follows a similar process: input the relevant details for your site or app, pick a layout or template, customize it to your liking, and hit publish. 

Tera Barton, a luxury makeup artist, created a website using the Wix AI website builder to showcase her work. The site features photographs of Barton’s latest weddings and photoshoots, cheerful messaging, and customer testimonials, among other elements. 

Barton Artistry

You can sell your AI-generated website or app designs and templates, or make money through affiliate marketing and selling products or services on your site.

Tools and services to use: Wix, Framer, CodeWP, Jimdo, Softr, Pico, Create

💡Pro tip: Conduct A/B testing, gather user feedback, and analyze data to ensure your app or website is relevant, user-friendly, and aligns with user preferences and evolving trends.

7. Offer AI consultation 

If you like working with people, offering one-on-one AI consulting services is a great way to earn some cash. 

As an AI consultant, you’ll help companies identify how AI can benefit their clients’ businesses, use AI to solve unique problems based on business objectives, and guide them through AI-focused projects. 

It’s more time-consuming than automating your knowledge in an online course or ebook, but it can be very fulfilling. Plus, you can offer more individualized and specialized coaching and charge premium rates.

Consider your education and experience before turning your skills into a profitable business. Review what other AI consultants charge as a reference point. Then, reach out to potential clients via cold calls, email, social media platforms, referrals, or market yourself through paid ads. Use AI tools to develop your messaging or ad copy, transcribe client calls, and evaluate the viability and potential of your client’s businesses.

Max Fritzhand, a freelance AI consultant, offers different AI consulting packages ranging between $1000 and $5,000 for businesses just starting with AI and needing help to optimize their AI solutions, or wanting to scale their AI solutions. Fritzhand’s service charge includes an initial assessment and strategic recommendations.

Fiverr

Tools and services to use: ChatGPT, Fireflies.ai, Validator.ai

💡Pro tip: Use the AI-generated transcripts from your discovery calls to create frequently asked questions (FAQs) for your site or create social media posts, web copy, or ad copy that speaks to your target audience’s pain points.

8. Sell AI prompts

Whether you’re an AI prompt writer or have had success creating good results from your AI prompts, you can earn from your skills. 

Sure, you can use an AI prompt generator, but you won’t always get creative, custom AI prompt ideas that will sell in AI prompt marketplaces, like PromptBase, PromptHero, or ChatX.

Take Ian Dikhtiar, for example, an AI creator who started a business selling AI prompts on PromptBase. Dikhtiar has been making money from selling custom, ready-to-use prompts to individuals and businesses. 

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Crafting effective prompts is an iterative process that results in fine-tuned outputs that provide value for users. For example, you can sell art prompts that generate specific visually stunning results to comic artists or sci-fi game developers. 

Once you master the prompt engineering process and consistently produce useful creations, package your top prompts and sell them to your target audience.

Best tools and services to use: ChatGPT and Bundly AI

💡Pro tip: If you want creative content, include your audience’s attributes and needs, voice, tone, and style in the prompt so the AI tool can know for whom it is writing and their preferences.

9. Create and sell AI music

AI-generated music became popular after the AllttA band released a track titled Savages, featuring an AI voice filter that mimicked rapper Jay-Z’s voice.

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With text-to-music generators like AIVA, Google’s MusicLM, and Shutterstock becoming more accessible to regular people, it’s easier to make money with AI. Choose a text-to-music generator, enter your lyrics, and then create artwork or footage using AI art generators for visual effects.

Some ways to earn from AI music include:

• Creating a dedicated AI-generated music channel and monetizing it through ads, sponsorships, merchandising, or affiliate marketing. 

• Licensing or selling AI music, sounds, music clips, or sound effects online marketplaces, like Amazon Music, AudioJungle, or Bandcamp, and stock websites. 

• Creating AI music courses and tutorials, like Berklee Online’s AI for music and audio course, which teaches people how to extract and recognize musical elements, music production, distribution, and more.

Best tools and services to use: ChatGPT, AIVA, Suno AI, Mubert, Descript

💡Pro tip: To create good AI music, use multiple AI tools, like ChatGPT to write lyrics, AI beatmaker for unique beats, AI voice generator to get voice clones, and AI audio editor to clean up the recording and remove distortions. 

How to make money with AI—requirements for success

Technical skills

Having some basic AI literacy and/or foundational technical skills, like creating simple AI prompts for writing content or generating images, can help you make the most out of the technology. 

Some AI income-generating ideas may require a deep understanding of machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP).

Let’s say you want to license your AI music. You’ll need domain knowledge and skills in music theory, production, mixing, mastering, and distribution alongside technical skills in AI models, like recurrent neural networks or music information retrieval.

Research

AI tools have a learning curve, which makes them difficult to use effectively. Before committing to a subscription, test-run the tools’ features through a free plan or free trial. You can also review tutorials or help resources to learn how the software works or how to use it for your idea. 

Creativity

AI tools cannot replicate human creativity, but it’s a critical skill for enhancing overall performance and business growth. 

Unlike AI, which is programmed based on the data it feeds upon, human creativity is spontaneous and requires imagination and inspiration. For example, AI tools can create content at scale for your blog or social media posts, but may lack the nuance of genuine human experiences, like a personal take on a product or service grounded in real-world experience.

Stay current with advancements in AI technology to identify opportunities and devise innovative ways to earn more.

Business skills

Along with building your technical, research, and creative skills, you’ll want to know how to start and run your business. Familiarize yourself with critical skills, like problem-solving, market research and analysis, consumer behavior, strategic thinking, communication, project and financial management, and networking.

Pro tips on how to use AI to make money 

• Use AI to brainstorm and evaluate ideas and tweak your plans until you have a viable business idea.

• Edit and revise content before publishing, so it’s factually correct and well structured.

• Make it clear to your audience that the content is AI-generated.

• Test run free AI tools with sample prompts to assess the type of output and note their strengths and limitations.

• Gather feedback from your audience on their pain points to build useful, relatable, affordable, and easy-to-use solutions.

• Work with an AI specialist to get the most out of AI tools and create real value for your audience.   

Hire an AI expert on Fiverr

Starting a side hustle might sound daunting. But AI offers plenty of opportunities to make money without spending too much time, effort, or money. 

If you’re just starting, partner with top AI talent on Fiverr to harness the power of AI and bring your project to life. 

Fiverr’s platform offers access to a global talent pool of experts and agencies and AI-assisted search and discovery. 

It’s simple: input the AI service you need, identify and connect with suitable candidates with the required skills and experience, then hire the right professional for your project. Plus, you get a secure dashboard to manage your projects, freelancers, and finances at no monthly charge. 

Find AI talent for your project on Fiverr. If you’re not a member yet, join now for free.

Make money with AI FAQ 

How do you make passive income with AI?

• Create digital products

• Offer AI marketing and advertising services

• Start an AI self-publishing business

• Make a virtual influencer

• Design and build apps and websites

• Offer AI consultation 

• Provide AI video editing services

• Sell creative artwork or graphic designs

How much can I realistically earn using AI to make money online?

The amount of money you can make using AI will depend on the product or service you provide. More complex AI products or services, like AI business coaching, videos, or apps, may bring in more money than simpler offerings, like blog posts, articles, or social media posts.

What are the costs to consider for using AI to make money?

Most AI income-generating ideas have an extremely low barrier to entry and cost almost nothing to get started. However, budget for costs like AI tool subscription fees (pay-as-you-go, monthly, or annual) and payment processing fees when receiving money from buyers. If you work with a freelance AI specialist, make provision for their service charges in your budget.

What to avoid when using AI to make money?

• Quality control issues: There’s always a risk of getting low-grade, bad, or incorrect content.

• Lack of human-like creativity and empathy: The content AI tools generate lacks emotion, unique insights, style, or elements that make high-quality content. 

• Poor translation: AI tools may struggle with context and culture-specific nuances, which can lead to harmful miscommunication or misinformation.

• Factual errors: While generative AI models' outputs may often sound convincing, the information can sometimes be plain wrong, biased, and easily manipulated to enable unethical or criminal activity.

Ethical concerns: AI’s unregulated systems raise ethical dilemmas around privacy, autonomy, accountability, and potential for misuse, which might lead to unintended consequences with serious implications.