How to Make Money Using AI in 2025

Artificial intelligence opens doors for companies, organizations, and individuals to increase their productivity, manage their daily tasks, and work toward their goals. A common goal for all three entities is to make more money. If you want to learn how to make more money with AI, you can explore several different avenues of using this technology to enhance your skills and talent. AI can help you accomplish more each day, but your underlying knowledge, experience, and skills will be the true drivers of your success. 

Discover ways to use AI to make an income, from exploring professional fields in artificial intelligence and creating monetizable content to using AI for smarter financial decisions and investment advice. 

Can I use AI to make money?

Yes, you can use AI to make money in several different ways. You can start a career working in the field of artificial intelligence, you can monetize creative work you generate using AI, and you can start a business offering AI-creation services to others. Considering all of the ways you can enrich yourself using AI, it’s helpful to consider first what AI can do.

What can AI do?

Foundational AI models are multipurpose models that can understand human language, process large data sets, understand visual information, and more. These broad capabilities extend to a wide range of specific tasks. For example, you can use large language models like GPT, Gemini, or Claude to generate text, images, video, audio, or code. 

While these foundational models excel at many tasks, you can also use them to create applications that focus on a smaller range of activities with higher accuracy. Training a foundational model in one task, such as customer service or writing blog posts, is a faster and less expensive way to create a specialized AI.

To give you an idea of the breadth of tasks AI models can accomplish, a few of the things you can do with AI include:

• Reading and summarizing documents

• Analyzing and writing text

• Translating texts

• Understanding and creating images

• Editing images

• Data extraction and data analytics

• Recognize faces

• Analyze sound

• Create audio or spoken text

• Transcribe or summarize a meeting

• Play games

• Generate code

Is it legal to make money with AI? Who owns AI content?

Yes, it is legal for you to make money with AI, even if the AI model was the sole creator of the content. The US Copyright Office issues guidelines stating that creative content created by AI is in the public domain, which means that no one holds, or is eligible to hold, a copyright. The department does leave a gray area where, if you contribute significantly to the creative work, you can protect your contributions under copyright law. For example, imagine that you ask an AI model to generate an image for you, and then you recreate that image as an oil painting. You can’t copyright the image because AI created the image. However, you can copyright your artwork that resulted from the AI-generated content because your creative contribution earns you that right. 

How to make money with AI

You can use AI to leverage your skills and talents for a lucrative side job or full-time career. You can start a career working directly with AI, or use AI to generate content and knowledge work that you can sell to clients, or monetize in other ways. Discover ideas and insights on how to make money with AI. 

Start a career in AI

Starting a career in AI, such as an AI engineer, researcher, or prompt engineer, is a strategy you can use to continue making money with AI in the future, no matter how the technology grows and changes. You can review the job skills you need with a program like the IBM AI Engineering Professional Certificate and pursue work in a professional field, helping to shape and adapt AI technology. A few careers you might consider, plus their average salary in the United States, include: 

• Machine learning engineer: $127,000

• Robotics engineer: $114,000

• Natural language processing engineer: $124,500

• AI engineer: $138,500

• AI researcher: $103,500

• Data engineer: $108,500

• AI product manager: $159,500

• Data scientist: $122,500

All base pay salary comes from Glassdoor as of February 2025 and does not include additional pay such as bonuses, profit-sharing, or commission. 

Use AI to offer creative services. 

You can leverage the generative power of AI to start a career offering freelance creative services. For example, you could offer a service to create websites and use AI to generate the first draft of your design quickly. Unless you advertise your service as AI-generated, you’ll need the skills to oversee the AI’s work and ensure you provide your clients with quality work. However, using AI can make the process faster and easier, helping you complete more work and earn more money. You can also use AI to help manage the administrative side of your freelance business. 

Some ideas for using AI to offer creative services include: 

• Building websites

• Writing blog posts or website copy

• Marketing services

• Social media marketing

• Writing email copy or landing pages

• Writing ebooks

• Creating product descriptions

• Graphic design or art services

• Translation or localization services

Make money with AI-generated content.

Another way of making money with AI-generated content is to monetize it in ways other than selling it directly to your client as you would in a freelance role. For example, you can use AI to generate videos for YouTube, which you can then monetize through the YouTube platform or use to sell products with affiliate marketing. Ideas for creating a revenue stream using AI include: 

• Creating YouTube videos and monetizing engagement 

• Use AI art to create physical products like prints, T-shirts, or mugs

• Use video or written content for affiliate marketing

• Use content to generate advertising revenue

Make money investing with AI.

Another way to use AI to make money is to invest in AI-related companies or use AI analysis to determine which market to make a move in. You can ask AI to help you learn about investing or to give you advice about how to navigate your specific financial needs. You can also use a financial management app with a robo-advisor to receive personalized advice on meeting your financial goals. 

 Create online courses with AI.

You can use generative AI to create the materials you need for an online course, and then sell that course to users. If you have expertise outside of creative services, like writing or designing, AI can help you fill the gaps you need to create content in whatever area you’re an expert. You can upload your files, like papers, documents, websites, or videos, and the AI model can help you convert them into a course with assessments and structure. 

Become an AI consultant.

Finally, you can make money with AI by becoming a consultant. You could help companies or individuals find ways to use AI to improve efficiency, meet organizational goals, and earn more money. For example, you could teach sales professionals how to integrate AI into the CRM process. If you have the skills to work with AI, you can share this knowledge with companies in a consultancy role and teach them concrete ways to improve their business processes with artificial intelligence. 

Learn AI skills to help you earn money or start a career on Coursera

You can use AI to make money by pursuing a job in the field of artificial intelligence or by using AI to increase your daily productivity and generate creative products. If you want to learn how to work with AI models or develop AI skills to start a career as an AI engineer, you can explore courses on Coursera to help you begin. For example, consider enrolling in Generative AI for Everyone offered by Deep Learning.AI to help you learn more about working with generative AI models. Additionally, you can learn role-specific skills with a Professional Certificate to help you prepare for a new role, like the IBM Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst Professional Certificate or the IBM AI Engineering Professional Certificate.