What I’d Learn Instead of AI Automation to Make Money in 2026

I scaled my own AI agency past six figures in 14 months and in this video, I'm going to show you why learning the technical side of AI automation in 2026 is the worst move that you can possibly make. So, let me explain. I've been running my own AI automation agency called JM Solutions since 2024 and having taught over 22,000 people on live sessions on how they can implement AI for their businesses. And now, I also mentor dozens of people on a one-to-one basis who are looking to do the exact same thing. And so, I have a realistic view on how AI agencies are actually making money. And so, I'm going to break down the exact skillset that used to pay in the past that does not pay anymore, the reframe that actually made this make sense for me, which I called the bridge, and finally, the five business skills that I'd fully go all-in in 2026 if your goal is to make money and build a business. And on top of that, I'm going to show you proof of just three of my students who have gone anywhere from zero to 10K and even 15K a month um in 6 months with their businesses. With that being said, let's dive in. Hey guys, quick one here. I'm hosting a live workshop on the 17th of May at 1:00 p.m. EST for 9:00 to 5:00 working professionals who want to get their first AI automation agency paying client in 30 days. So, if you're interested, check out the first link down below, apply, and I'll see you there. Let's get back to the video. Now, inside the AI space, there is one fundamental shift that has happened across the past 3 years. And as a beginner, if you're looking to actually build a business with AI, I can tell you that it is undoubtedly one of the most important things to understand when getting into the space. And to get my point across, I'm going to tell you a story about a guy called Marcus. Now, in 2024, Marcus walks into a sales call with a roofing company and shows them a version of a working voice agent. And the owner has literally never seen anything like this and Marcus closes a 4K deal in about 30 minutes. And it was all mainly because the technical skill was the leverage. It was the edge Demarcus had going into the call. And the owner had no other option because Marcus was the only option. Fast forward to 2025, Marcus walks into a similar call and the owner says, "Yeah, I mean my nephew showed me one of these last week." So, it's a completely different conversation because now the buyer or the person they already understand that there is a solution out there for the problem that they have. And right now it's 2026 and Marcus walks in and the owner says, "Yeah, man. I tried building one myself with Claude code last weekend." So, all to say that he has a same skill set but we have three different years with three different outcomes and conversations that he's having with the business owner. So, the shift that I'm talking about is that we are currently living in probably the biggest accessibility shift in the history of building software, right? Everyone is watching the same tutorials. Everyone is in the same Discord servers. Everyone has, you know, access to Claude code and to Gravity and 10 and every prompt that anyone has ever made, you have access to it. And so, the gap between I have an idea of something I want to build to something that actually works used to take 6 months, now it takes a weekend. And so, the uncomfortable truth that you have to face is that your technical skills will get commoditized. Mine already has, right? And I want to be honest here because a lot of my own income still depends on technical work. And it would be much easier for me to sit down here and tell you, "Hey, learn the tools because they're the most important thing." Well, they're not. Not anymore. Which is exactly why if you go back to my channel, the early stuff is very heavy on the technical breakdowns because that made sense in 2024 and 2025. But now in 2026, watching another tool tutorial is by far one of the lowest leverage things that you can do if your goal is to make money with AI. Because I'm sure that it feels productive but it is not productive, right? Feeling busy is not the same as making progress. So, let me give you a reframe that make this actually make sense for me. And I wish someone had told me this earlier when I started. And I call this the because a business is a bridge, right? On the one side is where your customer is right now. They're missing calls, they're losing leads, they're drowning in manual work, whatever it is. But on the other side is where they want to be, which is more money, less chaos, and fewer hours. And so your job, if you want to get paid, is to be the bridge that takes them across. And so here's exactly where most beginners get it wrong. They spend all their time obsessing over the vehicle that's going to get them to drive across the bridge, which is in this case Any time versus make, cloud code versus cursor, which memory notes, what are the best prompts, what are the best notes. And the reason this is a big problem is because the business owner that's on the other side of the bridge does not care about the vehicle. They care about the outcome. Man, I've literally closed five-figure deals where clients never asked me once what platform I was using. All they asked was, "Will this make me more money? Will this save me more time? If it did, when can I start?" Right? And so that's the entire scope of what they actually care about. And so the paradox in the soul space is that the more obsessed you get with the tools, the further you get from the people who pay for what the tools do. Because you can build the most beautiful, the most elegant, even the most agentic or multi-agent memory rooted enable workflow on planet Earth. But if you cannot articulate what tangible problem it solves and who it's for, you will not get paid, period. So stop asking what tool you should learn next, start asking what problem you're solving and who you're solving it for. Stop optimizing the vehicle, start optimizing the bridge. Stop measuring progress in tutorials watched, start measuring progress in calls booked. And that's probably the biggest shift between someone who makes money with AI and someone who doesn't. And I want to be careful here because I don't want this video to sound like another AI is dead hype video. AI is definitely not dead, the space is not saturated. I honestly hate the word saturation because it's mostly an excuse for people not to even start. Because what's actually happening is something different. The bar for knowing the tools has collapsed. And so if that's the only level that you're operating at, then you're competing with another million people who have watched the same exact tutorials just yesterday. And here's the trap with the AI specifically. Because AI is not like Facebook ads. You cannot just learn AI over a weekend. AI is a monster that keeps on getting bigger and bigger. Every month there's a new model, there's a new framework, there's a new tool, there's a new node, there's a new way of doing the thing that you just learned. So if you tie your sense of progress to have I learned the latest update, then you have just signed yourself for like a treadmill that never stops. And that's exactly what I call tutorial hell. And the worst part of tutorial hell is that it feels like work. Because the thing that I see over and over again with all my students who are working with me one-to-one to start their AI business, and they tell me this directly, is that they thought that watching videos was the work. They thought spending two hours on YouTube every single day was the thing they needed to do to be able to get further in making money with AI. And as you might be guessing, it's not, right? It made them feel busy for sure, but it didn't get them closer to their goal of getting the first paying client. Because tutorial hell is by far one of the most productive feeling form of procrastination ever invented in the AI space. And the longer that you stay there, the worse it gets. The less momentum you have, the less action you can take, the less progress, the less money, and you drift away from the life that you actually want, not closer to it, right? And now think about Marcus from before. The Marcus who's still winning in 2026 is not the Marcus who learned the most nodes or the most workflows. It's the Marcus who got out of tutorial hell first. Hey guys, quick one here. If what I'm talking about in this video sounds very uncomfortable but very familiar to your situation, and you do actually want to start your own AI agency, then I left the first link down below walking you through exactly step-by-step how you can do that by working with me one-to-one. It goes through the full process. If it sounds like a good fit, then feel free to apply. Now, let's get back to the video. So, with that said, if the technical skill is no longer the thing, then what is? I'm going to give you a framework called craft, which is the exact five skills that I'd learn and invest all my time into if I was starting again in 2026. And to be up front, none of these are sexy, they're not cool, they're not made for views. They're tangible things and realistic skills that you have to learn if you want to build a business. So, the first one is C, which is conversations. Now, the truth is this, most beginners have never had a real conversation with a real business owner about a real problem. And maybe they've watched videos about what businesses want, but that's not the same thing. Because I can guarantee that you will learn about what's actually monetizable in 20 discovery calls than in a hundred YouTube videos. And the niches that look saturated online sound completely different when you have an actual roofer or even a med spa on a Zoom call telling you what's broken in their day-to-day. Then we have R, which is real offers. Now, an offer is not an AI automation. That's a category. A real offer is a specific outcome for a specific person done in a specific way. So, a bad offer can be I do AI automations for businesses, but a good offer is we build a speed-to-lead voice system that calls and qualifies your ad leads in under 5 minutes and books them into your calendar without hiring extra staff or changing your ad setup. So, if you notice what changed, well, the bad version is a category and the good version is a specific outcome for a specific person done in a specific kind of way. And this sentence is worth more than any anything tutorial you ever watch. Then we have A, which is anatomy of the buyer. Now, I can tell you that after working with 50 businesses from literally SMBs, companies making 10K a month, all the way to nine-figure companies making hundreds of millions, I can tell you that companies in general, they don't buy the best solution. They buy the solution that feels the safest, clearest, and most relevant to their exact situation. Cuz once you internalize this, your demos will change, your proposals will change, your follow-ups will change, and your pricing also changes. Then we have F, which is frontline selling. I put this here because a lot of people think that sales is about pushing the other person and convincing people. Selling is not pushing. Selling is helping the right person go from this part of the bridge all the way to the other part of the bridge like we mentioned earlier. And so you're helping the person see clearly that the thing that you're offering is the move that helps them to solve the problem that they have. So if you can't run a discovery call, if you cannot handle your price objections, if you cannot ask for the close, none of your technical skills will help you and they won't matter because nobody will ever buy what you do. Then we have the last one which is T, which is the thing that you can outsource. So this right here is probably the most important point on this whole video. So listen up because you can hire someone on Upwork to build the technical side for pretty cheap. There are great builders for 20 to 40 an hour all over the world right now. So with that said, the technical skill, the thing that the whole YouTube algorithm is pushing you towards, is the easiest thing to outsource. But the thing that you shouldn't outsource at the start is sales because a stranger on Upwork cannot reach into your network and book your calls. A stranger cannot build conviction about your offer. And a stranger cannot show up on sales calls as you. And so sales is the one thing in this entire business that has to come from you. And it's the one thing that the algorithm will never push you towards because nobody's going to click on watch me cold call for 3 hours. That's exactly why I put 80% of my learning time into craft and 20% into the tools. The opposite of what most people are doing right now. Now I do want to show you what craft actually looks like because if there's no results, if there's no data to back this up, then all of this is just theory. So here are three of my students and I want you to notice something specific about what each one of them actually won on. So the first one here is Anthony. Anthony was working 9 to 5 when he started. He came in with very very low technical AI knowledge and within 60 days he booked 88 sales calls, and within 90 days, he had $35,000 in deals. And I can tell you that he did not win because he was the most technical, he won because he put 90% of his focus on the business side, which is finding the right niche, building out a real offer, actually getting on sales calls, sending outreach, and the tech side he picked up along the way. So, now we have Zeeshan who, in difference from Anthony, he started with literally zero technical experience or background. He couldn't have built a workflow if you even handed it to him. And within 6 months, he made $120,000, and he closed recently a $50,000 deal. He didn't crush it because he knew how to build the best systems, he crushed it because he got obsessed about what problem he could solve for what niche. [music] And he learned the tech along the way, but only the parts that he actually needed to be able to fulfill and deliver the offer that he was selling. And then we have Simone, who also had no technical background coming in, and 6 months later, he's running a 15k a month AI agency. It's the same exact pattern. He was very strong at identifying real business problems. He was very sharp on his offer, and the tech was just a vehicle to get him from A to B. And the reason I showed you these three people is because they had different niches, they all had different offers, and they had different paces. But the pattern that I saw across all three that we focused on was the order that they prioritized the work, which is business first and tech second. Because the reality is that if I had just told them to just go all in on the tools, then I don't think I would have these numbers to show you. I would just have three people in my program who are very, very good at the tools, maybe Anytown or even Call Code, but they would be still looking to get the first paying client. So, with that said, here's exactly where we land. This is not AI is dead, this isn't even stop learning the tools. You absolutely need to know enough of the tech side to be able to deliver. But what I'm telling you is that the leverage has moved, and if you're serious about actually making money with this, and you're not just learning AI for fun, just tinkering on the weekends, then you have to be very careful about which people and which videos you spend your time on. Because most creators in this space, they're not bad creators, they're awesome. But, they're just not making content for someone who's trying to get paid. They're making content for someone who's trying to learn, which is a completely different audience and a completely different result and outcome. But, I can also tell you that there's the one person who goes and just learns all the tools and keeps getting better and it never stops and becomes the best person at building with AI. And there's the other person who understands that learning AI is just a vehicle. Now, it's about talking to business owner and focusing on the sales side to be able to make money. Right? One actually just keeps on learning and gets stuck, and the other one builds a real business. And if you're looking for a step-by-step path through the Craft framework, which is offer, niche, outreach, sales, and delivery, and if you want to be inside a 6-month one-to-one mentorship program with me directly, then I left the first thing in the description where you can check out the video. If it's not a good fit, that's fine. If it is, then feel free to apply. But, if you're earlier than that, then check out this video on the screen where I show you the top six AI agency offers that actually make money in 2026. With that being said, guys, I really hope you found value from this video. As always, I'll see you in the next one.