How To Make Money With AI: 13 Ideas for 2026

Starting a business once required paying for work you didn’t have the time or skills to do yourself. But today, AI tools can take a first pass at tasks like copywriting, design, and coding, which lowers the cost and effort of getting a business off the ground.

Many of these tools have free trials and low-cost subscription tiers, so you can make money with AI even if you don’t have much capital to invest upfront. 

Business owners are taking notice of this opportunity. In a survey conducted by Shopify and The Harris Poll, 67% of US respondents said AI tools are making entrepreneurship more accessible.

Below are 13 practical ways to make money with AI—whether you’re starting a new service or scaling an existing business—along with four common mistakes to avoid.

Can you make money with AI?

There are several ways to make money with AI. If you already sell a service, AI tools can help you scale it by taking on more clients. They also lower the barrier to selling a product of your own, like a software tool or an online course. 

If you’d rather build an audience, AI can assist in the production work behind video channels and newsletters that earn money through advertising or subscriptions. 

And if you already run an ecommerce business, AI can handle the market research and translation work involved in expanding your store.

How to make money with AI: 13 ways to generate income

• Launch or grow an ecommerce business
• Scale your service business
• Sell a product
• Build or reach an audience

By handling repetitive tasks, AI tools can reduce costs and other barriers to entry to become an entrepreneur or scale a business. Here are 13 ways to use AI to generate revenue, sorted into four categories: 

Launch or grow an ecommerce business

Launch a market-researched product

A key challenge of a new product launch is knowing what people actually want, then arriving at product-market fit. AI can read customer feedback at volume, so you can get market insights without hiring a research firm or manually analyzing a large volume of data. 

An AI assistant can tell you:

• Product preferences. The exact sizes, materials, and features customers request and buy.

• Search language. The words buyers use when describing and searching for products.

• Customer friction. Recurring questions, objections, and complaints in customer reviews.

Founder of Soft Life SleepwearShari Gail Chua tells Shopify that she polled her social audience for months before developing her first product line. When the comments came in, she exported them to a spreadsheet and asked AI to summarize what people wanted.

Shopify offers multiple tools and features for people new to ecommerce. Use Shopify’s AI website builder to create a free store design in minutes. Enter a quick description of your business or products to generate custom themes with a unique look tailored for your industry. 

Once your store is live, Sidekick acts as your built-in assistant for answering setup questions and handling everyday tasks. Together, these AI tools let you move from idea to first sale faster.

Cost: Performing data analysis with an AI assistant costs very little. ChatGPT and Claude both have free versions, with more advanced data analysis tools starting at $20 per month. Sidekick is built into Shopify; the Basic plan starts at $39 a month. 

Launch in a new market

If you have an ecommerce business but you’re not currently selling globally, you can use AI to bridge the gap to international markets. AI tools can help you translate your product pages and other website copy into local languages. 

Shopify Translate & Adapt automatically translates your store into two languages for free, with additional languages available on paid plans. Shopify Markets handles local currencies, duties, and payment methods. North American brands using Shopify Markets sell into 14 new markets, on average.

Cost: Translate & Adapt and Shopify Markets are included in Shopify plans (starting at $39 per month). Budget for a human review of anything legal, financial, or safety-related.

Scale your service business

Product photography 

AI tools can speed up the repetitive and labor-intensive parts of visual production: swapping backgrounds, generating color variations, and staging products for different seasonal promotions.

Several tools make this work more accessible. Shopify Sidekick converts raw smartphone photos into polished, studio-style product photography and generates custom backgrounds. Use this to place existing inventory photos into holiday or lifestyle settings without re-shooting. 

Because these capabilities are directly accessible to business owners, your value proposition isn’t simply image generation. Instead, clients hire you for visual curation and your discernment about which images require a physical photoshoot versus AI editing.

Cost: Sidekick is built into Shopify; the Basic plan starts at $39 a month.

Video editing

Traditional video editing is time-consuming. AI tools automate tedious production tasks, helping you take on more client work as a video freelancer or agency.

Descript edits video footage directly from auto-generated transcripts; you can trim scenes simply by deleting lines of text. You can also use Descript’s tools to strip out filler words, automatically add captions, identify the most engaging moments in your footage, and reformat videos for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels. This makes it easy to repurpose content—for example, turning a client’s webinar or podcast episode into social clips.

General-purpose AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT can also help you draft voice-over scripts and video descriptions.

Cost: Descript has a free starter plan, with paid tiers starting at $16 per user per month. ChatGPT and Claude have free tiers and paid plans starting at $20 per month for higher usage limits. 

Content strategy and copywriting 

If you already write for a living, you can use AI to scale your output. Large language models like Claude or ChatGPT excel at topic research, outlining, and turning bullet points into prose.

A 2025 Shopify survey* found that 69% of business owners who use AI do so to generate content, more than any other use. What sets your work apart from commoditized, AI-produced content is original research and human editorial intuition.

Learning how to prompt an AI model can help you get better results from Claude or ChatGPT. However, even with strong AI prompt engineering, you’ll need to manually edit the draft to fact-check the output and make sure it aligns with the client’s voice and tone.

Cost: Much of this editorial work can be done using Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus, both of which cost $20 per month.

Social media marketing

Managing multiple social media accounts requires an ongoing stream of new content, which can be overwhelming to draft by hand. 

An AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT can take a single asset, like a blog post or a product video, and tailor it for different channels: a carousel for Instagram, a thread for X, a longer commentary post for LinkedIn, and so on. An assistant can also help with editorial planning—for example, turning your campaign ideas into a monthly content calendar.

This leaves you time to focus on community engagement, campaign strategy, and client relationships. 

Cost: General-purpose AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT have free tiers, with paid subscriptions starting at $8 per month for ChatGPT and $20 per month for Claude. 

Ecommerce store design and setup

Building an ecommerce store used to require significant development and design time. With Shopify’s AI website builder, you can describe a product in a few sentences and get a custom theme, including colors, fonts, and page layouts. 

On an episode of Shopify Masters, AC Hampton, founder of the ecommerce education company Supreme Ecom, says that building a storefront used to take him five to seven days. It now takes less than 30 minutes to build a complete custom site, including product pages.

AI tools can also generate copy, including product descriptions, collection summaries, FAQs, and store policies.

Because these capabilities are available to all Shopify users, your target audience will be people who aren’t comfortable using AI themselves, or you’ll need to add additional services—like design expertise—to differentiate your offering. 

You might consider starting locally, helping busy brick-and-mortar businesses launch their first online store. Some small business owners simply lack the time or comfort with technology to bring it to life.

Cost: Your clients carry the cost of an ecommerce platform subscription (such as Shopify, with a Basic plan starting at $39 per month), so your overhead is minimal. 

Sell a product

Software tools

No-code and low-code AI tools allow you to create software applications with minimal development experience. You can monetize software ideas by creating apps and scripts such as: 

• Inventory alerts. Automated scripts that notify store owners when stock drops below a set threshold.

• Booking tools. Custom scheduling widgets that let service providers accept appointments without emailing back and forth.

• Bookkeeping tools. Software that categorizes expenses from receipt data and generates routine financial reports.

If you have expertise within a niche market or industry, you can also use AI to develop customized versions of generic tools like CRMs or project management systems.

Coding assistants like GitHub Copilot work inside code editors to suggest lines of code and debug errors. Browser-based builders like Replit take a plain-text description and produce a running web app. 

Cost: Coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Replit have free tiers, with paid plans starting around $10 to $20 a month. Once an app is deployed, you’ll also pay for cloud hosting, which usually scales with usage. 

Digital templates and workbooks

Selling digital products is an efficient route to earning money with AI. If you have subject-matter expertise to sell, an AI assistant can help you structure and produce digital assets such as planners, spreadsheets, and how-to guides. 

A clear point of differentiation—a unique perspective or insight that informs your digital products—will make your product stand out from generic versions anyone could create with AI.

All you need is a general-purpose assistant like ChatGPT or Claude and an online store to sell them. Unlike physical products, digital products carry no per-unit manufacturing or inventory costs. Once the file exists you can sell it repeatedly.

This approach tends to work best if you already have a distribution channel, whether that’s a social media following, a mailing list, or an engaged online community. 

Cost: General-purpose AI assistants have free tiers, with paid tiers starting at around $8 per month. Storefront hosting on Shopify starts at $39 per month for a Basic plan, and allows you to deliver files digitally with the free Digital Products app. 

Online courses

An online course takes more work to produce than a static asset, but it can also command a higher price. 

Across 32,000 courses on the platform Ruzuku, the median price is $110 and the mean is $416, because some high-ticket courses pull up the average. Higher-priced courses usually include coaching, community, or certification. Research existing courses in your niche and see what they charge for comparable content.

If you have expertise or a proven process to share, AI tools can take on some of the operational work of launching an online course. These might include: structuring your curriculum (based on rough notes, audio transcripts, or topic ideas), producing companion materials (like workbooks, checklists, and quizzes), and creating written summaries of video recordings. 

You can host the course videos and resources files from your website. Course apps such as Tevello and Courses Plus, available on the Shopify App Store, manage video hosting and enrollment. They also have other features like quiz delivery and course progress tracking, so you don’t have to build these yourself. 

Cost: Course management apps on Shopify have free tiers and paid plans starting around $20 to $30 per month. For content production and organization, either use the free tier of general-purpose AI assistants or pay for higher usage limits, which start at around $20 per month. 

Print on demand merchandise

With a print-on-demand (POD) store, you use AI to generate designs from a written description, and a supplier prints them onto POD merchandise like T-shirts, posters, or mugs. 

“On demand” means each item is manufactured only after a customer orders it, so you pay the POD company once you’ve already been paid. 

The advantage is that you aren’t holding onto extra inventory, and you can test different designs at a low cost. This prevents deep-discounting or taking a loss on several units of an unpopular item or product variant. The trade-off is printing one at a time costs more per unit than a bulk order, so margins are thinner.

Print on demand is a growing market: according to Grand View Research, it’s projected to grow at 23.6% annually through 2033. Apparel is the largest category, accounting for nearly 40% of total revenue, and home décor is the fastest-growing segment.

Cost: You’ll need a storefront (Shopify plans start at $39 per month), an AI image generator or Sidekick (included with Shopify plans), and a print-on-demand app, like Printful, Printify, or Gelato. These apps are free to install, with optional paid plans from around $25 to $40 per month. 

Build or reach an audience

Earn ad revenue from video

Video is a scalable way to earn from content: a single video can keep earning once it’s published, and it’s free to post on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

AI tools lower production barriers by automating tedious tasks like generating subtitles and transcripts, extracting short clips from footage, and creating thumbnail graphics. 

AI can help you with production, but don’t expect it to do all the work of generating videos. YouTube’s inauthentic content policy has made mass-produced and templated videos ineligible for monetization. 

In Sprout Social’s Q1 2026 Pulse Survey, 56% of social media users said they encounter “AI slop” often or very often, and half of Gen Z respondents had already blocked, muted, or unfollowed a brand or creator over low-quality AI content.

Cost: AI editing tools like CapCut and Descript have free tiers, with premium editing capabilities available from around $20 per month.

Note that some ad platforms require you reach an audience threshold before they pay you for content. For example, YouTube requires 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 valid public watch hours in the past 12 months or 10 million valid public Shorts views in the last 90 days. 

Start a newsletter

A monetized newsletter allows you to build a direct relationship with an audience, and AI tools can help you with content production. An AI assistant can help you brainstorm topics, conduct research, and turn raw notes into first drafts.

Two ways to earn money from newsletters are:

• Subscriptions. Charge readers a monthly or annual fee for access, typically by publishing some posts for free and others for paid subscribers only.

• Affiliate programs.Affiliate networks like Amazon Associates and Impact pay you a commission when readers buy through your tracked links.

Cost: AI chat tools for research and drafting have free tiers or paid plans from around $8 per month. Newsletter publishing platforms have different pricing models: Substack takes a percentage of subscription revenue, while Beehiiv charges a flat fee starting at $49 per month to add a subscription fee to your newsletter.

4 mistakes to avoid when using AI to make money

Understand what AI can do and what it can’t—without getting bogged down by learning every tool on the market. AI makes it possible to experiment and iterate, so test what works for you. To make the most of your time, avoid these actions: 

Waiting until you understand AI to start

A lack of knowledge is the most common reason people give for not starting with AI tools. Among store owners surveyed by Shopify who weren’t using AI, 29% said they didn’t know where to start and 29% weren’t sure what AI tools could do.

Instead: Learn by doing. Pick a task from the list above and do it with an AI tool, then compare the result to what you would have produced on your own. 

Trying to master every tool

When you’re getting started, it can be tempting to sign up for every tool at once. The risk is that you get overwhelmed, or you end up knowing a little about a lot of tools instead of a lot about one or two.

Instead: Pick a general-purpose AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude and one tool for whatever you spend the most time on, like Adobe Firefly for product images or Descript for video. Spend a month learning what these can do for your business. 

“There’s a total misconception that you need 50 different tools,” Cat Goetze, AI educator and founder of Physical Phones, says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “We use one or two on a regular basis, and we just know how to use them really, really well.”

Publishing raw AI output

AI makes it easy to produce a lot quickly. Deciding what’s good enough to publish is the part that still falls to you, and it’s what determines whether any of it sells.

Instead: Treat anything AI produces as a first draft and set aside time to edit it, with subject matter experts, if needed.

On an episode of Shopify Masters, Dustin Pourbaba and Brian Wong, cofounders of the wellness brand Feel Goods, say they use AI for the first 80% of a draft, then hand it to their team and their nutritionists to finish.

Expecting AI to find your customers

Shopify’s survey* found that marketing was the most common first-year challenge, at 37%, with finding customers close behind, at 36%. The strategies store owners relied on most in their first year were word of mouth (53%) and building a social media presence (35%), both of which take time and effort.

Instead: Brainstorm how you’ll reach your first 100 customers before you start building. You might post in a community you’re part of, build an email list before you launch, or partner with someone who already has an audience. 

*Based on a 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with more than two years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.