Where Is The AI Money?

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DEEP DIVE
Where Is The AI Money?

The AI “money-making” content game is like that new girlfriend who seemed cool at first… until she started eating all your snacks and making you pay for everything.

Let’s get one thing straight:

If it takes you 2 minutes to create with AI, that’s not where the money is.

• AI-created logos are not selling on Fiverr for more than $5

• An AI generated blog post is not going to rank in Google

• An AI generated video may get views but can’t be monetized

• Vibe coding an app in 2 days doesn’t mean it’s production ready

These are the obvious plays. And the window to flip them for real $$$ closed before most people even realized there was a window.

Yet that’s all you see on AI-Twitter and AI-YouTube.

Here’s the truth: people aren’t dumb. They’ve heard of ChatGPT. They’ve messed with Lovable.

Showing up and offering to “implement AI” in 2025 is like showing up in 2010 with a laptop and saying, “I can get you on Facebook.”

Cute. But not a business.

That’s first-order thinking. It’s surface-level. No moat.

So where’s the real edge today?

• Distribution → who can actually get attention

• Unique data/insights → stuff AI can’t just spit out

• Execution/Agency → turning content into products, funnels, offers

If you’ve ever run a business, you know: the hard part isn’t making the product (unless you’re trying to invent teleportation). It’s selling it. Marketing eats 90% of your time.

One quote I keep in mind: “You’re not in the business of your product. You’re in the business of selling your product.”

AI makes building easier, faster and cheaper. But creating something with AI doesn’t put you in business.

So who’s actually winning right now?

Not the gurus promising “$10k/month with AI.” The only thing they’ve mastered is selling you the course.

The real winners are:

• The infrastructure plays (chips, servers, compute)

• The small % of SaaS tools that are real innovation, not ChatGPT wrappers

• Businesses that use AI to augment and automate, not as the product itself

Everything else is very very noisy ATM.

Here’s the way I think about it to nudge you back in the right direction for your business or if you’re still looking to capitalize on the AI wave:

• First-order is creating the content. Anyone can spin up a blog post, a logo, or a demo app. That stuff’s already a commodity, a race to the bottom where the cheapest wins.

• Second-order is distributing it. Owning an audience, ranking, or attention stream. Harder, but still crowded fast.

• Third-order is owning the system it feeds into. The platform, the backend, the product ecosystem. This is where real leverage lives.

If you want to make money with AI , stop fighting over first-order scraps. Start building second- and third-order assets that compound.