Is it true that 2025 will be the last easy year to make money online, given AI’s impact on jobs and the economy?
I don’t think we’re at that point yet. AI will certainly automate many roles, but we still have plenty of opportunities for the next few years. While the landscape will get more competitive, it’s not a reason to panic. Keep building skills, stay adaptable, and you’ll find niches where AI can be an advantage rather than a threat. In short, don’t worry too much—there’s still room to succeed now and in the near future.
I didn't say the AI gold rush would die in a few months; it's a transformation of capital from payroll to cloud‑based machines, with money flowing to infrastructure providers like OpenAI. As a service provider, you can help implement that shift. Realistically, it will take years before it no longer makes sense to pursue this work. I have read the AI 2027 paper, and the reality is there's no guarantee entrepreneurs won't be replaced—machines can do knowledge work thousands of times faster and better, and that gap is widening. Nothing humans do is economically sacred; eventually AI could take over. In the midterm, focus on business skills that let you create value in this transition and get comfortable acting with uncertainty, because AI can't yet take real‑world action. Your ability to act is the edge you have.
I think sometime over the next 2 to 3 years; I've been saying that for the last 6 months, maybe 2 to 2.5 years. Saturation is a relative term—just because something is called saturated doesn't mean you can't make money in it. Think of saturation like peak oil: the point where the most money is possible using the business model, after which it declines. However, interest in the model and the average impact of systems we build are increasing over time as AI technology improves, so you can still make a lot of money on the way down. If I were you, I'd get up and running with the stuff ASAP, because no market tactic lasts forever, and even if today's tactics stop working, there will be new business models I'll learn about and share with you.
Most ad agencies I see hardly last a few years because the market is already shifting to performance‑based pricing in many niches. That’s why a lot of people are quick to sell shovels, mentorship and coaching instead of actually running agencies themselves. My take on the future is two‑fold. First, think of the industrial revolution: machines replaced seamstresses, created new roles, and boosted productivity. Likewise, new automation will render today’s agency models obsolete, but it will also open new opportunities for those who can adapt to emerging technologies. No model lasts forever; we’ll need to shift to whatever new tech or business models appear. Second, AI will eventually swallow up most of what agencies do. In the next 10‑15 years AI will be as good as—or better than—humans at design, copy, and many deliverables. If AI can generate art, copy, and strategy, the skill set we rely on today will become commoditized. So rather than tweaking the same thing slightly, we’ll need to find fundamentally different ways to add value, perhaps by focusing on uniquely human insight or by embracing an AI‑driven renaissance where we re‑evaluate our role in creating economic value.
Great niche. If you can learn to use AI video tools better than 99.9% of people, that's a very high-income skill right now. Will that skill premium persist much longer than 6-12 months? Probably not — the bar for skill will drop a lot as the tools improve and it becomes easy to generate high-quality output. But for the next year or so, it's a genuinely high-value skill to learn — you could probably make something like a million dollars with it in that window.