Is the market still open for newcomers to AI automation agencies, or is it saturated? As someone with an ML background considering whether to go all in on an agency or pursue AI engineer roles, what path would you recommend?
The market is never simply open or closed; it's always a matter of degree of difficulty. With your strong technical background, AI engineering involves building systems from scratch, while an AI agency uses existing systems and stitches them together at a higher level of abstraction—letting you launch faster and deliver value quicker, but you won't use all your ML skills. The trade‑off is that you'll also need to learn business ownership, which brings risk and downside; I went broke for most of my early adulthood learning that lesson. Your family’s advice to take a safe job comes from a place of protection, and over the next year or two they might be right, especially since software engineering roles are being deprecated. However, the top demand remains for people with real AI/ML engineering experience. If I were you, I’d use that experience to build your own model—perhaps a transformer—and create a few portfolio pieces (e.g., a nano‑GPT‑style project) to apply for AI/ML engineering jobs. In your spare time, learn no‑code basics with my tutorials so you can fall back on building with Make or NADN if job hunting stalls.
Yeah, for sure. I would pivot a bit and brand yourself more as an AI consultant or strategic consultant who uses no-code tools rather than necessarily an AI automation agency. If you think about it, many people don't realize that as a beginner, most of your work as an agency owner is actually just freelancing—being a consultant, sole proprietor, independent contractor. So I would start there, providing services as an individual, and worry about building an agency that provides services later. Because actually doing the thing, getting good at the business, then building the business, hiring, managing, tracking time, payroll—those are two fundamentally different things. Get good at delivering business insights and knowledge, then building systems, and afterwards you can worry about scaling and hiring people.
If I were you and thinking long‑term, I’d ask where everything is heading. Everything is moving toward AI and automation over the next five years; what happens after that is uncertain, but my honest advice is to choose the AI automation business model. I’ve found the most success with it and have run it four times. The main reason is leverage: AI and automation offer far more leverage than traditional marketing agencies. Traditional marketing agencies are declining—this model peaked around 2017‑2019 and has been falling since, partly due to market saturation and the rise of SaaS tools that automate tasks like scheduled posting, brand strategy, and marketing strategy. In contrast, the AI automation model is still early; it really took off around 2021‑2022 with ChatGPT, and I predict it will continue growing until about 2027‑2028, when AI agents could double the market and demand. After that, demand may dip slightly as agents become more advanced. If you're in Saudi Arabia, you're essentially seeing a delayed version of this curve, giving you a few extra years to ride the upward trend. So, if I were in your place, I’d go all‑in on AI automation.
Yeah, listen—feeling lost is completely okay. It’s fine to feel lost; the reality is you just have to make a move anyway. In modern entrepreneurship you basically have to lower your bar for what counts as “confident enough to succeed” and then just go for it. Decades ago, when starting a business required a lot more capital, you needed to be far more confident about ROI. Nowadays you can launch an AI automation agency with a couple hundred bucks, as I’ve shown multiple times, so you don’t need to be all that confident. The most important thing is just to get going. The idea that you can’t find a good AI automation to sell isn’t true; it’s that your standard for what counts as a “good” automation is just too high. Use the blueprints I’ve shown you, figure out the simplest three‑ or four‑module system you can, and start selling. Your biggest obstacle is yourself, not the niche or the specific firms you’re targeting. An inbound calling agent for real‑estate or dental offices could be great—just put something together, start talking to real customers with it, and you’ll quickly see how to improve the system into the high‑value solution you’re envisioning.
I don’t think every agency model will disappear, but AI is changing things rapidly. The people who will be most insulated over the next two to three years are those who are already implementing AI and automation in other businesses. If you’re actively using these tools, you’ll have a better chance of staying relevant. The next five to ten years are uncertain, but the field of AI‑driven automation will remain valuable.