All right, If you are thinking of becoming rich with AI in 2025. So, what do you do? You watch all the Sam Altman podcasts. You watch all these hype AI videos. I mean, hey, you might even think the ChatGPT agents are going to make you millions. Well, listen up. In today’s article, I’m going to share to AI skills to make money—the exact skills that will separate the people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2025 from the people still asking ChatGPT to write their grocery list.
Most importantly, I’m going to share skills that you probably will not find anywhere else. Because I’m not going to tell you, oh, just build AI chatbots or start an AI agency because heaven forbid that you actually learn skills that businesses desperately need and are willing to pay premium rates for. No. I’m not going to give you any of that surface level advice that’s built specifically for people who want to play with AI tools instead of making real money with them.
I am going to give you seven practical skills that you can and should start learning today. Skills that are already making people six figures. If you are feeling stuck and just wondering which business model is right for you, think about the laziest ways to make money in 2025. I want to make it clear that people have this wrong connotation about being lazy when in fact often being lazy just means the most smart way. Different business models make the most sense depending on your specific situation.
If you are ready to stop making excuses and start making real money, well, in that case, make sure you grab a pen and paper and pay very close attention to what I’m about to share. Here are the seven AI skills you need to master in order to become rich in 2025.
1: Prompt Engineering – The Foundation of AI Success
Skill number one might actually be the most important one because it’s the one skill that makes every other AI tool actually work. This skill will determine whether you get genius level results or complete garbage from every AI system that you touch. And what am I talking about here? Well, I’m talking about prompt engineering.
Think of AI systems as incredibly intelligent employees who can do almost anything, but they’re really bad at reading our minds. You see, these employees that we have, they need very precise, clear instructions to deliver exactly what it is that you want. The issue is that most people don’t know how to give those instructions properly.
Think of it like this. Imagine right now I give you 10 employees for free to work for you. If you gave them vague, unclear instructions, what would happen? Well, they would all just produce different results. Most of them are mediocre because they don’t understand what you actually want. But if you give them clear, specific instructions with proper context and examples of what success looks like, suddenly those same 10 employees become incredibly productive and deliver exactly what it is that you need. And AI works exactly the same way.
The difference between getting amazing results and garbage isn’t the AI itself. It’s actually how clearly you communicate as the leader giving the instructions. The numbers actually prove how critical the skill actually has become. Recent industry research reveals that 78% of AI project failures stem not from technological limitation, but from poor human AI communication. What does this actually mean? It means that right now 78% of companies are wasting massive amounts of money on AI projects that don’t work not because the technology is broken, but because no one knows how to communicate with them properly.
Which is why prompt engineering has become the foundational skill for building successful businesses in 2025. Because as much as we think that AI is actually going to replace us, that’s not true. The reality is that AI needs human intelligence to unlock its potential. Without skilled prompt engineers, AI is just expensive software that produces mediocre results.
How Prompt Engineering Actually Works
Let me break this down into the core skills that you need to master. First, you need to understand prompt structure. Most people just type short and vague instructions like, “Oh, write me a blog post.” And then they wonder why they get garbage on the other side. Garbage in, garbage out.
Professional prompts are structured into five key parts: role, context, task, audience, and then output format. So instead of saying, “Write me a fat loss ad,” for example, instead you would write:
For the role, you are a direct response copywriter specializing in health and fitness marketing for women over 40.
Giving some context I’m launching a 12-week online fat loss program that combines intermittent fasting with strength training specifically designed for hormonal changes during menopause. The program costs $297 and includes meal plans, workout videos, and weekly group coaching calls. It addresses slower metabolism, stubborn belly fat, and energy fluctuations common during this life stage.
For the task I need you to write a Facebook ad that drives clicks to my landing page.
For the audience, this is for women aged 45 to 55 who are going through menopause, who are frustrated that their previous weight loss methods no longer work due to hormonal changes and want an approach that works with their changing body.
For the format, please format an attention-grabbing headline, 3 to four sentence copy, strong call to action, and keep the total length under 125 words.
Do you see the difference here? This is exactly how you create professional high-quality marketing materials without hiring expensive agencies or having previous experience ultimately giving you a competitive advantage.
Advanced Prompt Techniques
Some other prompt format examples include role-based prompting. This is actually where you tell AI exactly who it should act like. For example, you can actually instruct it to act as a McKinsey level strategy consultant with 15 years of experience in business transformation. What’s cool is now you actually have access to the same caliber of strategic thinking that Fortune 500 companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for.
You can actually ask complex business questions, get detailed market analysis, and receive strategic recommendations whenever you want. It’s like having an industry-leading CEO in your pocket without six figure consulting fees. This one technique alone can improve your results by 300 to 400% because you are giving AI a specific expertise to draw from.
Next is example-based training. You learn how to provide examples. Instead of explaining what you want, you actually show the AI two to three examples of perfect outputs and it will match the pattern consistently. So, if you want emails written in a specific style, well, then you give the AI examples of emails in that style. If you want social media posts with a certain tone, you show a post with that tone.
You could even feed the AI content from your favorite creators, video transcripts, or speeches from industry leaders that you admire. The AI will analyze their communication style and write scripts, emails, or marketing content that matches their approach without you having to lift a finger or pay the exorbitant copywriting fees that a lot of agencies charge. This means that you could have the writing style of some of the top marketers in your industry working for your business 24/7 for free.
Lastly, there is a chain of thought prompting. This is actually where you break down complex tasks, projects, and businesses into smaller steps that the AI can work through logically. This, by the way, is incredibly powerful if you want to start a business because you can use it. You can actually map it out to figure out what business to start and how to start it.
Instead of spending months and months trying to research what might work, you get the AI to walk through it step by step. You can ask it to first look at what people are actually buying right now. Second, find groups of customers who aren’t getting what they need. Third, figure out how hard it would be to get started in said business. Then you get it to estimate how much money you could make and create a plan for you actually starting all of that in a space of 60 minutes.
What used to take expensive consultants weeks, sometimes even months to figure out to get a full business plan and analyze a full industry, you can now get that done in an hour. The AI will walk through each step telling you where the opportunities are, who you’d be up against, and exactly what you need to do to get started.
What all these prompting techniques have in common is specificity and structure. Whether you’re using role-based prompting, example based training, or chain of thought prompting, you’re always giving the AI clear context, specific instructions, and examples of what success actually looks like. The more precise and the more structured your prompts, the better your results will be.
2: AI Automation – Turning Repetitive Tasks Into Profits
Now that you understand how to communicate with AI effectively, how to give it the right instructions to get exactly what you want, let’s actually go ahead and start making money with these skills. Moving on to skill number two, you need to understand that every single day businesses are throwing away money like it’s on fire. I’m talking about losing 50,000, 100,000, even millions of dollars on tasks that could be done automatically for free by people no smarter than you.
The skill I’m talking about here is AI automation. And before you think that this is some super technical coding heavy thing that you need a computer science degree for, it is not. This is something you can learn using tools that are mostly just point-and-click such as Zapier, Make or N8n.
But first, what exactly is AI automation? Think of it like hiring a super smart assistant who never sleeps, never gets tired, and never makes mistakes. Except instead of paying them a salary every month, you set them up once and they work for free forever.
So why does this matter so much? According to Slack’s workforce lab, desk workers on average dedicate 40% of their work time to low value, repetitive tasks that lack meaningful contribution to their core job functions. So that means that almost half of their day they are doing boring mind-numbing stuff that doesn’t require any real thinking.
Previously if you want to get this repetitive work done you had one of two options. Option A: do it yourself or option number two is hire a virtual assistant. But quite frankly both options suck because they’re either expensive, time-consuming or they don’t scale.
Real-World Automation Impact
So how do I know all of this? I know this because I personally do this in all of my companies. I have more than one automation running every single second of the day, day in day out, weekdays, weekends, it does not matter. That adds up to about 2.6 million automations every single month.
These automations handle everything from data entry to email sequences to KPI tracking to even out of office requests. To put this into perspective, if each one of these automations would typically take a team member about 2.5 minutes to complete manually, we’re saving roughly 6.5 million minutes every single month, considering an average 45-hour work week, which translates about 180 hours a month. That is the equivalent workload of 36 employees saved right there. If you add that up over a year, I have saved literally millions of dollars.
Can you see why this is actually such a valuable skill? And that’s not even the best part. You can implement this in your business as well.
Essential Automation Tools
I’m sure you’re thinking, “Okay, well, this sounds amazing, but how would I actually get started? What are the tools you mentioned and how can you realistically build with them?” Well, let me break that down for you because understanding these tools is so crucial to your success.
- Zapier – Think of Zapier kind of like your training wheels. It’s the most beginner-friendly platform out there. You can literally just pick a trigger, like when someone fills out my contact form, and then from there, you pick an action like add them to my email list and send them a welcome message. Zapier connects over 5,000 different apps. So, whatever tools your business uses, Zapier can probably go ahead and link them together.
- Make.com – This is where you graduate from simple automations to actually building intelligent workflows. You see, with make, you can actually create complex decision trees. As soon as you mark a plumbing job as complete in your system, automatically send the customer a thank you text and ask for a review. If they don’t send a review within 3 days, send them a follow-up email. And then, if they leave a five-star review, automatically send them a discount code for their next service. It’s still visual and drag and drop, but it has so much more capability on the back end.
- N8n – This is a more advanced option. It’s open source, which means it’s free if you can host it yourself, and it also gives you unlimited customization. This is where you go when you need something really specific that the other platforms simply can’t handle.
The Business Strategy Behind Automation
Here’s where most people get automation completely wrong. They learn the tools, build a few basic workflows, and then wonder why businesses aren’t throwing money at them. The issue is not your technical skills. It’s that you don’t understand the business that you are trying to help. You can’t solve problems you don’t understand and you can’t charge premium rates for generic solutions.
Instead of trying to help every business with everything, you can pick one type of business and become the automation expert in that industry. Here’s the strategy:
- Pick a niche: Pick a specific type of business to actually focus on. Don’t try to help restaurants and real estate agents and plumbers and every other business. Just pick one. When you specialize, you can charge three to five times more because you’re not just an automation guy. You are the automation expert who understands their specific industry.
- Study how they actually work: Immerse yourself in understanding how these businesses actually operate. Watch videos made by people in that industry. Read their trade publications. Join their Facebook groups. If you choose dental practices, watch videos about dental practice management. Learn their workflow from patient scheduling to treatment to billing. Understand their pain points, their busy seasons, their common problems.
- Research their problems: Spend time researching the actual problems that these businesses face. What keeps them up at night? What manual tasks waste their time? Where do they lose money because of inefficient processes? You’re going to start noticing patterns. Maybe every dental practice struggles with appointment no-shows. Maybe every fitness studio loses members because of poor follow-up. Maybe every contractor forgets to follow up for reviews.
- Talk to real business owners: Talk to business owners in your chosen niche. Don’t try to sell them anything. Just learn. Ask them about their biggest time wasters, their most frustrating daily tasks, the things they wish they could automate. Most business owners love talking about their challenges. They will tell you exactly where they’re bleeding time and money if you just ask the right questions.
- Identify automation opportunities: Once you understand how they really work, automation opportunities will become obvious to you. You’ll see processes that can be streamlined, follow-ups that could be automated, data that could be connected, and instead of offering generic automation services, you’re going to be in the position to actually issue authority because you have a value add to their business.
The beautiful part is once you master automation for one type of business, you can scale this approach, build templates, create systems, maybe even develop software specifically for that industry. But it all starts with picking one type of business and becoming obsessed with understanding how they work.
3: AI Development – Building Custom Solutions
This brings me to something I need to be completely honest with you about, something that will really determine whether you become just another automation freelancer or someone who builds truly valuable systems. The approach that I just described, picking a niche and understanding their problems deeply, is absolutely critical. But there’s another level that most people never reach, and it’s where the real money and competitive advantage actually lives.
These tools we just covered, they are incredibly powerful for connecting existing systems. But here is what happens when you get really good at this. You start running into walls because a client needs something custom that no existing app can do. They need automations that the platforms simply just can’t handle. If you want to build applications that companies can truly count on and scale with, you eventually need to understand the technical foundations, and that is coding.
Here’s the truth. Learning these no-code tools can absolutely make you over 100K per year. But if you want to break into the 200 to 300K range, you eventually need to go deeper. You need to become the person who can build what these tools can’t do.
I’m not saying you need to learn coding right now. Start with these tools, master the business side, make money, but keep in mind that the automation specialists making the most money are the ones who can say yes to any client request, not just the ones that fit into their existing platforms.
What AI Development Actually Means
AI development is about learning enough technical skills to build custom AI applications that solve real business problems. Think of it this way. Someone had to create Zapier, Make and all those platforms. AI development is the skill that lets you become one of those builders.
Most businesses eventually hit walls with off-the-shelf tools. Their processes are too specific. Their data is too complex. They need AI that understands their industry in ways that generic tools never will. That gap between what businesses need and what existing tools can provide – that is where AI developers make all of their money.
Core Technical Skills You Need
Let me break down what you actually need to learn to start building custom AI solutions.
First, you need to learn Python. This is a language that most AI applications are actually built on. Before you panic, Python is actually one of the easiest languages to learn. You do not need to become a coding expert overnight. You just need to understand enough Python to work with data, connect to AI services, and build basic apps.
Second, you need to understand how to work with AI APIs. This means learning how to connect your applications to services like OpenAI, Claude, or other AI platforms. Instead of just using ChatGPT through their website, you now actually learn how to integrate it directly into custom applications that you actually build for clients.
Let me give you a concrete example of what working with AI APIs actually means. Let’s say, for example, a local law firm asks you to build a tool that can summarize legal documents. Right now, they copy and paste each document into ChatGPT manually, one at a time, and it takes forever. With the AI APIs, you can build a simple application where they drag and drop 50 legal documents into a folder on their computer. Your application automatically sends each document to ChatGPT and gets a summary back and creates a neat report with all 50 summaries. Instead of them spending 3 hours copying and pasting documents one by one, your custom application does all 50 documents in 5 minutes automatically.
Next is data handling. You need to understand how to actually work with data. Most AI applications involve taking a business’s data and making it useful, cleaning it, organizing it, and feeding it into AI systems in the right way. This is often where the real value is. Businesses have tons of data, but just don’t know how to use it effectively. You become the person who turns their messy data into valuable AI insights.
Learning Through Real Projects
The best way to actually learn AI development is through working on real projects. And the best place to start is a platform called Kaggle. This is basically where companies post real business problems that need AI solutions and people compete to solve them. Every competition comes with real data from real companies. Google posts problems that they need solved. Netflix posts challenges about their recommendation system. And they pay quite handsomely to fix these problems.
But here’s the best part. You can see how other people solve the same problem. When someone submits a solution, they often share their complete approach, including all of their code and documentation. So you can take a problem, try to solve it yourself, then you can see how the winning solution approached it. It’s like having access to the best AI developers in the world and learning directly from their work.
Instead of wondering what kind of projects you should build, just go to Kaggle, pick a competition that interests you, and start working on it. You will learn faster than any course ever could teach you.
4: Data Analysis – Turning Information Into Insights
Let’s talk about data analysis. Most business owners are already measuring their data. They track sales, website visits, customer information, but the problem is that they are only scratching the surface of what the data can actually tell them.
Here’s the difference. Traditional data analysis shows what already happened. AI data analysis predicts what’s going to happen next and tells you exactly what to do about it.
Think about it this way. Most modern businesses generate massive amounts of data every single day. Customer interactions, transaction records, website behavior. The volume is staggering. Your brain simply wasn’t designed to process this much information, let alone sift through it in any sort of meaningful way. Even a small business might have thousands of data points flowing in daily through multiple systems. The human brain hits a wall trying to comprehend this scale of information, meaning that most of the valuable insights hiding in your data remain completely invisible.
But AI thrives on big data. AI can simultaneously analyze every data point across multiple different business systems and in the process identify complex relationships and patterns that would simply be impossible for any human to detect through data analysis.
Look, every business has data. Most just simply have no clue what to do with it. And that is the opportunity right there. When you can analyze their data and even your own business data and find exactly where you are losing money and how to fix it, that is immediately valuable.
Getting Started With Data Analysis
How do you actually get started? Learn SQL. That’s it. SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is basically a very simple way to ask database questions in plain English like commands. Think of it kind of like a Google search but just for business data. Literally, all business information lives in databases and SQL is how you get answers from those databases.
5: AI Copywriting – Words That Sell
Every business needs words that sell and that creates a massive opportunity for you. Think about it. Every business hosts websites, sends emails, posts content, runs ads. And here’s the thing, their copywriting can always be better. You never fully have a 100% perfect piece of copy. This is really where AI copywriting becomes such a valuable skill to have.
Tools such as ChatGPT, which is about $250 a year, or Claude, I think it’s about the same, or even more advanced professional level tools such as GhostWriter OS, which is $3,000 a year, I know, which is very expensive, but it’s a custom-made tool specifically for the purpose of copywriting, direct response copywriting, and basically crafting the perfect copy to make clients and yourself money.
I will say maybe I’m a bit biased because that’s one of my software businesses, but it doesn’t matter what you use. The point is the better the tool and the more tailored the tool is specifically for the purpose of creating words that sell the more money that you will make.
The Power of Better Copy
For example, let’s say that you run webinars to sell your digital product. If you create a webinar script that retains 80% of your audience when you actually get to the pitch part opposed to one that only brings 20% of your audience by the time that it gets to the pitch, well then in that case you’ll make four times as much money.
If on average your webinar converted 10% after the pitch, you were able to keep 80 out of 100 attendees as opposed to 20 out of 100 attendees, that means that instead of converting two customers (10% of 20), you will convert eight customers (10% of 80). That’s four times as much money from the same webinar.
The best part is that every business needs better converting ad copy, higher converting video sales letters, and more engaging content. Whatever it is, your business needs the skill. When you can create copy improvements that directly lead to more customers and more revenue, you become unstoppable in your market.
Creating Your Unique Voice
If you want to take it a step further, you can create a copy that sounds exactly like you, but with the persuasion techniques of the world’s best copywriter. What do I mean by this? For example, you can take a creator and you can actually train the AI to speak exactly like them, taking all the marketing principles from their content.
Here’s how you do it. You train it by feeding it videos, transcripts, scripts, everything about the particular individual. But then you also tell it to act as an expert copywriter. It will mesh the two together to give you phenomenal results.
The point I’m trying to get across is this. AI copywriting is one of the most valuable skills you can learn because it directly controls how much money you can make. The businesses with better writing will dominate their markets. Learn AI copywriting and you become the business owner who doesn’t depend on anyone else for success because at the end of the day, the right words can be worth millions of dollars.
6: AI-Assisted Software Development
Here is a skill that’s completely changing who can build software and that is AI-assisted software development. For decades, building software required years of programming knowledge. If you had an idea for a simple tool, maybe an expense tracker for your freelance business or a client portal where customers could check project statuses or an inventory system for your small store, you had two options. Either learn how to code yourself or hire very expensive developers.
Hiring developers meant paying thousands of dollars, waiting weeks for back and forth communications, and hoping that they understood exactly what you wanted. Most small business ideas never got built because the barrier was too high.
Now with tools like Replit or Bolt and many others, you can actually build functional software simply by describing what you want in a detailed prompt.
The Competitive Advantage
What makes this so valuable is the combination with other skills. Remember how I talked about picking a business niche and understanding their specific problems? Well, now you can actually build those custom solutions for those problems.
Let’s say a local contractor wants a job estimation tool that accounts for their unique pricing structure. You can build that and this transforms you into someone who creates new tools. That is the difference between charging $3,000 for a project and charging $15,000 for a custom solution that no one else can provide.
7: AI Design – Professional Visuals Without the Cost
For skill number seven, here’s something that used to be a major barrier to starting any business. You need a professional design. On the basic side, you need a logo, a website, and consistent branding. On the more advanced side, you need ad creatives that actually convert or maybe even thumbnail designs.
Most entrepreneurs either spend tens of thousands on design agencies or launch with amateur visuals that immediately label themselves as small time. AI design tools have completely eliminated this barrier. You can now create professional quality visual content that would have cost thousands of dollars as well as weeks of back and forth with designers in minutes.
With AI, think about what this means for someone who’s starting a business in 2025. This is like having a world-class graphic designer in your pocket that you can access at any time. One that creates professional-looking branding, ad creatives, and content. Literally everything you need.
Concrete Examples
Let me give you some concrete examples that show you just how insane this has become. Let’s say you need a thumbnail for your video. Tools like Thumbnail.ai, and in fact, even Canva’s AI thumbnail maker can generate professional thumbnails in just seconds. You can just describe your video content, and it creates eye-catching designs that are proven to increase click-through rates. No more hiring designers or struggling with Photoshop.
Let’s say you need a specific photo of yourself doing a particular action for marketing. Instead of hiring a photography team and setting up an expensive shoot, tools like GetImg.ai or FreePik can now generate photorealistic images that are indistinguishable from real photos. Design teams personally use tools like this and the results are insane.
The Window of Opportunity Is Now
Look, I want to be completely honest with what we just covered. Every skill I showed you, all of these used to be separate jobs that required years of training and expensive teams 10 years ago. If you wanted to start a business, you would need a developer to build your website, a designer for your branding, a copywriter for your marketing, a data analyst to understand your numbers, an automation specialist to handle your workflows.
That is easily $200,000 in salaries or even $50,000 in freelance costs just to get started. Today, you can handle all that yourself. Not because you’re some genius, but because AI tools have made these skills accessible to anyone who’s willing to learn them.
The barrier between having a business idea and actually building a business has never been lower. And think about what that means for you specifically. You don’t need to save up massive amounts of money. You don’t need to convince investors. You don’t need to hire a team before you make your first sale. You can literally start testing business ideas this week with nothing but just the AI tools that I’ve showed you.
This window is not going to stay open forever. Most businesses are still figuring out how to actually use these tools. Most beginners still think that they need huge teams and startup costs to get their business off the ground. But that is changing fast. The people who learn these skills now while the majority is still catching up will have an enormous advantage not just in making money but in having the freedom to build the kind of business and life that they actually want.
You have never been in a better position than right now. The tools exist. The opportunities are there. The only question is whether you’re going to use them or wait until everyone else figures them out themselves.
I apologize for maybe a very dense AI article compared to a lot of the other content out there, but I didn’t want this to be surface level. I didn’t want to just scratch the surface. I didn’t just want to give you the information that everyone else gives you. I’m not saying that you should do all these, but even if you just learn one or two of these skills, it’s going to take you so far, especially when you learn these AI skills and you pair them up with the right business model.
The key is to start with one skill that resonates with you, master it, and then gradually add others. Whether you choose prompt engineering as your foundation, dive into automation to solve real business problems, or focus on AI copywriting to directly impact revenue, each of these skills represents a pathway to financial freedom in 2025.
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