I'm an 18‑year‑old full‑stack web developer with API and marketing theory knowledge. I'm unsure whether to start a marketing agency or an AI automation agency, especially since I'm in Saudi Arabia where few talk about this. Should I focus on building my personal brand as an AI expert first, given I have four to five months before university starts? What would you do in my position?

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.

business modelai automationmarketing agency

Related answers

youtube ↗AI & Automation

What do you recommend for me to start? I feel lost and can't find a good automation to sell; I was thinking about an inbound calling agent for a real‑estate or dentist firm.

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.

inbound callingreal estatedentistautomation

youtube ↗AI & Automation

What was the biggest lesson you learned in your hardest AI project on your AI journey?

The biggest lesson I learned is that the actual product or service you sell doesn’t matter much—AI automation is just a fulfillment mechanism. What really counts are the core business systems you build around it: lead handling, sales scripts, onboarding, admin, hiring, marketing, taxes, etc. Those pieces stay the same across industries; only the specific service you deliver changes. Once you have a solid business foundation, you can swap in any offering and still succeed. I’ve seen the same principles work when I sold videography, local SEO services, courses, and even events—so it’s less an ‘AI journey’ and more a general business journey.

aibusiness fundamentalslesson

youtube ↗AI & Automation

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.

aiagencycareermarket

youtube ↗Niches

Is niching down to marketing agencies a good option for an AI automation agency, and what assets can I send to marketing/creative agencies that aren’t just AI‑generated?

I think marketing agencies are great; I niche down with them and make more money than most with an equivalent service. Whether you need to differentiate depends on your goals—if you aim to be the Uber of automation agencies selling to marketing agencies at $100M/year, you'll need more differentiation than just 'marketing agency'; if you want a tiny niche, you can target whatever you want, especially if you have experience to stand out. As for assets to send to marketing or creative agencies that aren't just AI‑generated: you can build them whole HTML websites (customized with context) and host them; generate newsletters from templates; create PPC ad creatives based on trending ad‑library content; produce high‑quality proposal templates; make slide decks; essentially any day‑to‑day marketing agency deliverable can be generated with AI, but the biggest impact is the customized HTML template because clients are impressed by receiving a full website.

marketing agenciesassetshtml template