How to Make Money Using AI in 2026

Written by Coursera Staff • Updated on

Explore how to make money using AI through career opportunities, monetizing creative products, and using AI to increase your productivity.

[Featured Image] A teacher in an engineering lab is showing two students how AI can help them make money.

Key takeaways

  • Ways to make money using AI include starting a career in artificial intelligence (AI), using AI to offer creative services, and monetizing AI-generated content.

  • People are using AI to make money by working in the field as an AI engineer or researcher, data engineer, AI product manager, or data scientist.

  • You can also make money online using AI by investing in AI-related companies, creating online courses with AI, or becoming an AI consultant.

You can make money using AI tools by offering services to build websites, offer social media marketing, and write ebooks. 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.

If you want to build career-ready skills, consider enrolling in the IBM Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst Professional Certificate. In as little as four months, you’ll have the opportunity to learn how to identify trends, create visualizations, and build dashboards as you analyze data. Upon completion, you’ll have earned a shareable career credential for your resume or LinkedIn profile.

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

  • Performing data extraction and data analytics

  • Recognizing faces

  • Analyzing sound

  • Creating audio or spoken text

  • Transcribing or summarizing a meeting

  • Playing games

  • Generating 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 leaves 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 using 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 median total salary in the United States, include:

  • Machine learning engineer: $164,000

  • Robotics engineer: $145,000

  • Natural language processing engineer: $112,000

  • AI engineer: $145,000

  • AI researcher: $132,000

  • Data engineer: $134,000

  • AI product manager: $199,000

  • Data scientist: $157,000

All salary information represents the median total pay from Glassdoor as of August 2026. These figures include base salary and additional pay, which may represent profit-sharing, commissions, bonuses, or other compensation.

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

Read more: What Is a Social Media Marketer? And How to Become One

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

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

  • Using video or written content for affiliate marketing

  • Using 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 customer relationship management (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.

How can I start earning with AI?

To start earning money with AI, develop AI skills in automation and prompt engineering and soft skills like creativity, empathy, and adaptability. Then, start using large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude to understand the different ways you can use the models to launch a career.

Learn more about AI with free resources

Keep learning by subscribing to Career Chat, where you can access industry insights and career tips. Explore these free resources to learn more about ways to utilize AI in your career:

Whether you want to develop a new skill, get comfortable with an in-demand technology, or advance your abilities, keep growing with a Coursera Plus subscription. You’ll get access to over 10,000 flexible courses.

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