The Only 19 Skills to Make Money in the AI Era

AI has flipped everything on its head, including the skills that actually make you money. Concerns are growing about AI replacing some human workers. I talked to CEOs who are replacing design departments, even coders. Procter Gamble saying that it'll cut up to 7,000 jobs. If you think that it's not coming for your industry, think again. I run an AI venture studio where I'm hiring people every single day, and right now I have 17-year-olds who run circles around people with decades of experience, not because they're smarter, but because they have the right skills. So today I'm going to rank those skills from best to worst, starting with social media management. Social media is one of those problems that AI was built to solve. Every brand needs a presence, so the work to do that has always been in high demand. Every time I look at one of these skills, I'm going to evaluate it under these 3 criteria. The first one is barrier of entry. Is it something you can learn quickly? Quickly? Is it easy? Is it understandable? Is a lot of content out there? Can you learn it in a weekend? It's low. You could literally learn it right now. Second is defensibility. If I learn this, how likely is AI to show up and replace me? It's kind of weak because AI writes the posts and the captions and the hooks and the calendar, and honestly, the future models will probably do that automagically. And third is profitability. Do people actually care, and will they pay me top dollar to learn it and implement it in their life? People are paying less and less for this kind of skill because the AI is doing it. So for this one, I'd probably say B. Next skill, public speaking. Ooh, this is a good one. Essentially standing in front of a room and yapping, trying to get people to learn things and hopefully create a transformation in who they are. The people that suck at it, you fall asleep. The people that crush it, you walk away feeling inspired. So barrier of entry, huge. Because it's hard to learn. Defensible— can AI come in and get on stage and do it? Fuck no. You imagine a robot on stage trying to deliver something passionate and motivating? Humans need to feel the human. And then profitable— how much money can you make doing it? Well, guess what? Speaking is the highest paid career in the fucking world. I know people that get paid $1 million to give a speech. So very profitable. So because of that, I'm going to put it A-tier because Learning it makes you incredibly valuable. It's hard for other people to get. It could make you money, and AI is not going to come and take your job. But you're not going to learn it overnight, and that's the only reason it's not S-tier. Next skill: trades. Think about plumbers, electricians. In the day of the data centers and AI, HVAC— you need to cool the chips, right? The hands-on work, the, the person that shows up. Again, I don't have robots coming to my house to fix my pipes. There are people showing up. And the truth is, is fewer young people are getting into these skills every year, which means if the demand's going up and the people in there is going down, there's a whole lot of money to be made. It's the work that everybody relies on that almost nobody wants to learn. Now, the barrier of entry— you gotta go learn the skill. It's not easy. It's not a YouTube video on the weekend. How defensible is it? Uh, again, I don't see robots coming in and start wiring cables yet, although hey, Elon's working on it. And then profitability— yes, you can make a lot of profit. It's just, can you scale it? I don't know, but you can do it. You can make some money. I'm going to put it as C because there's a barrier of you because you're selling your time. Unless you build a business, just learning the trade ain't going to make you a lot of money and it's hard to learn, but it is defensible, which I love. But I'm still going to put it C because I'm ranking on can you make bank? The fact that you're selling your time is going to cap how much money you can make. And I wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time, and it's hard to buy back your time if you got to do the thing manually that you're doing and show up on location, geographically constrained. See what I'm saying? Where social media, man, you can have 15 people helping you out behind you and you can just be on your laptop, tap, tap, tap it. But it's definitely not an F tier like most people think. Next skill, project management. There's 3 things project managers do. They manage the scope, they manage the budget, and they manage the time. I think that AI will eventually do all of those. The one thing that I continue to focus on every day, build agents around, is change management and project management. Is it valuable? Yes. Do I think AI can disrupt it fairly quickly? Yeah. So Barry Ventry, a little bit. Defensibility. I'm pretty sure most tokens being spent right now on AI is doing work that looks like project management. And then profitability. I don't pay a lot for people that are managing projects. I pay for change and people using AI to make changes where the money is. So I'm going to rank it fucking D only because one of my best friends is a project manager and I don't want him to cry if he watches this video. Next skill, sales. Ooh, the one way to make a lot of money. Sales is the ultimate skill. It's the meta skill. If you learn sales, you can apply it to recruiting, you can apply it to business, you can apply it to anything. You can apply it to having kids and getting them to do what you need them to do. And the truth is, nothing happens until somebody makes a frickin' sale. It is the oldest income skill there is. It's the highest paid in any economy, and the best closers can literally write their own check in any market. So we get the barrier of entry. How hard is it to be good at sales? It's actually not easy 'cause most people are not willing to confront their psychology. They don't realize that great salespeople go from rejection to rejection to rejection with a fucking smile, with enthusiasm. They never second-guess themselves. The technical part is easy to learn. You just need to do volume. The defensibility, can AI take it over? There's already been proof where AI is doing outbound calls, dealing with objections. Can AI bring a deal to close? Yes. In my company Atlas. That's what they do. It supports the process of sales, but the closing part requires nuance, requires relationship, requires understanding, and it is getting there. So it's actually not as defensible as it used to be a couple of years ago. And I see a trend line where it's going to be an issue. And profitability, you can make bank. I literally have 18 and 19-year-olds on my sales teams that make more money than both of their parents combined. I still think it's highly valuable. Like, and here's the thing, it's a meta skill. So I'm gonna put it right behind public speaking cuz it's almost like a salesperson is a public speaker eventually. If they can get over themselves and learn how to command a room, then all of a sudden you're taking the exact same skills you used to do one-on-one and you get on a stage and you do one-to-many. So it's right behind, but it's incredibly valuable and it will be disrupted by AI, but it's gonna cue you up to kick ass in life. And look, if you're a CEO looking to scale your business, I have a gift for you. I built an entire 8-figure business without ever jumping on a sales call. I did it all through chat, literally in my DMs. So I put that entire system into my Sell by Chat playbook. It's yours for free. It's got all the scripts, what to ask, how to qualify, how to deal with objections. And if you want it, just go find me on Instagram and DM me the words YouTube SBC, which stands for Sell by Chat, and I'll send it right over. Okay, next, SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and essentially it's the skill to have companies rank high in the search results of a search website like Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeve. How old are you, man? But now with AI, who's fucking searching anymore? I'm in my AI chat searching for things and having it go do the searches. It's not clicking. Links in a result set. So barrier of entry, it's actually still a hard skill to do well. It's a technical skill and most people still suck at it. Defensibility, how AI-proof is it? Well, I don't know if people are going to be searching in the future. I think Google realized that. That's why it has its AI search results. And profitability, I haven't paid anybody for search engine optimization in a while because it doesn't matter to my business. So I am going to rank it as F because I think search results are the way of the newspaper. And if that is your business, I'm sorry to hear. I just think there's way easier, better skills to learn that's actually going to make you money than do the equivalent of selling ads in a newspaper. For example, the next skill, AEO, search engine ranking doesn't matter anymore. AEO stands for answer engine optimization. Back in the day, it kind of was like in the Q&A core space. Today it's AI because people are asking questions of their AI agents, their chats, and the answers are coming back as a fully developed, researched, beautiful answer. But that is what AEO is, is how do I show up in there? If somebody searches best book on productivity, how does Buy Back Your Time rank in the top 3? I don't care about being the first few links on Google. I care about being the answer that the AI gives to the person that's searching. So barrier of entry, incredibly tough. All of our companies focus on AEO, and it's changing right now every 2 days because the AI models are updating themselves as they continue to refine. So then the rankings change. Defensibility, I think the skill of educating the AI to recommend a company is going to always be needed because the AI models are gonna be the future of purchasing. And then profitability, people pay top dollar to get more customers. I'm actually going to rank this S-tier. Is it really S-tier though? Hmm. No, no, no. It's B-tier. It's almost like the new version of social media, right? Because like I used to get paid to create audience on social to sell stuff. Now I got to learn how to get found in the results. So it's B-tier and it's above social media. I think the money's capped in regards to like how much you can get paid, whereas like sales and public speaking, like that's more immediate. The skill's easier to learn. You can get paid more. Defensible against AI. That's why I'm putting it there. I'm still unsure of like how defensible is long-term if the models get so good they don't even care what anybody's trying to do to like fuck around and tweak the results. So there's a little uncertainty there. Next we have data analysis. Ooh, this one's good. Essentially digging through the company's numbers, trying to find useful insights to help the people making decisions make better decisions. Companies have always paid these people. A lot of money. They used to be consultants. I always joke that a consultant borrows your watch and tells you what time it is. Now what's happened is AI has created a massive opportunity to use the data, the information, to train the AI so it can make better decisions. And when every business is still being run off of spreadsheets, somebody that can come in and organize the data and make it make sense to feed it to the AI so it gives better answer, I think there's value there. Now, barrier of entry is very easy today. Like the fact that you have a background in data doesn't really matter because my AI can do better than most people came that have quant backgrounds. Defensible? I don't think long term when I look at what the model is going to do, I always ask myself in 6 months how much better it's going to be. I mean, Claude launched a whole set of skills to do financials, a whole set of skills to do data cleanup, a whole set of skills to figure out the insights from the data, even how to visualize the data. With visualizations and now artifacts where you can build a tool to like manipulate the data. So defensible, not that high. Making money, I honestly wouldn't pay that much for that skill. That's crazy for me to say. I literally am a little taken aback how I'm gonna score this because I wouldn't have thought this a year ago, but I'm putting a D tier above project management. Like I do need a data person over a project manager, but the truth is, is most of my team members use the AI to do this work. So not very defensible at all. And when I think of like where the models are going to disrupt people, that job, goodbye. Ooh, next skill, media buying. You have a lot of insight in this one. I do. Media buying is the skill of buying ads for a product to get them customers, right? And really just deciding the creative and the messaging and what platforms you should use to get a attention. Almost every business needs advertising. It is how people get new customers, from local shops to giant companies. And oftentimes the media buyer is trusted with millions of dollars in ad spend to manage and direct and orchestrate. Now, when I look at the barrier of entry with the AI tools, a lot of people can learn this over the weekend. Now, there's nuance, and I don't think it's as easy as people think, but it's very approachable. Defensibility, low. Can AI do my job in the future? Oh yeah. We've already built platforms that partner with AI to generate creative, to run ads, to manage the ad spend. And it's already happening. And it would be happening even more if Meta opened up their API to let people do it. Profitability. Do people spend money on media buying? Yes. Is that going down? 100%. One of my friends recently fired like 40% of their media buyers. And those people are not finding jobs. So where am I ranking this one? I'm going to put it C-level right behind trades. I think you can make more money doing electrical shit than media buying right now. It's crazy. You can make $300,000 a year wiring up a data center in Texas. Nobody's paying that for a media buyer. A year and a half ago, it would have been flipped. Next, we got graphic design. Design is what drives the world, right? We design it in our mind first and then we create it. And without a visual, it's hard to understand what we're creating. So we don't want to spend a lot of money. Now, AI has changed the game for anybody in the creative field. So barrier of entry, how hard is it for somebody to learn design? It's actually hard. Taste can be learned. It can't be taught, right? You have to just do stuff and try stuff and you got to trust your gut. It's like writing songs as a professional songwriter, hard as fuck. Defensibility, will AI come for that work? Oh my gosh, let me look at my budget. I have gone from spending tens of thousands of dollars on designers I stopped sending stuff to my designer. Why would I wait for the iteration when I can just prompt it? Every tool that is in design, literally all the tools have built AI into them. And then profitability. People don't pay for it anymore. When I can prompt a new website and I can prompt a new ad campaign, I can prompt a new mockup. Why would I pay for it? I went from design dollars to token dollars. Again, if you're great, you'll still get paid because you have taste and you have design, you have care. But I mean, it's a D-tier above data analyst. Next skill, cybersecurity. The ability to keep bad people out of my company from stealing my money. It's the spoof emails. It's the AI getting so good that the bad people are using the AI to attack the companies. So barrier of entry, it's a hard one to learn. And if you can learn this, it makes you special. Defensibility, we just heard with the latest model from Anthropic called Mythos, where it was starting to find exploits exploits and opportunities to attack software at a scale that was so crazy they didn't release the model so they could allow all the cybersecurity departments to catch up in the banking and aviation and infrastructure space. So defensibility, yes, AI is going to help it. But if you're in it, I just think it's really defensible. This skill is not going away anytime. If anything, it's going to require more smart people doing it. And profitability, I'm assuming if you're great at it, you can write your own check. So I'm going to rank it B-tier because it's hard to learn. Yes, it's defensible, I think, long term. Yes, you can make a lot of money, but it is hard to learn. Next, we got prompt engineering, the ability to write prompts that create outputs that companies value. A year ago, incredibly valuable. Today, I don't think anybody cares. Most people figure out prompt engineering. So Bear Ventry, not complicated. You can just copy-paste shit. Defensibility: AI's writing the prompts, not valuable. Profitability: I haven't paid for prompt engineers or any type of scripts in a long time, so I'm going to rank it prompt engineering. I still think there's value there. I'm going to put it at C tier above trades because you're in the AI space. Next skill: email marketing. The ability to communicate a message that gets opened by a viewer. Barrier of entry: low. The Defensibility, low. Most emails are written or assisted with AI. It's not hard. You actually train on the previous emails that worked best, and then the AI will literally write more that look like the old ones that worked best. Profitability, used to get paid a lot of money to do this. Now it's almost like an admin task. So low. I'm going to put it D tier above graphic design because it's money. People like to pay for money, but AI is going to do it in the future. Next skill, video editing. You're not going to believe what I'm going to say on this one. And I think because of the rise of social media, it's just become such a popular skill. Everybody needs their Sam, their creative director, their editor, their clippers. Barrier of entry? I think like taste, like design, it's actually hard to learn how to do it well. Sure, there's tools to do it. I still think it's not an easy skill to learn. Defensibility? I mean, more and more I see AI take over that space. So weak sauce. Profitability. It's funny, one of my friends hired an editor yesterday and he's not even paying him. He's paying him on performance. So that's how little bit of money you might make because if it doesn't perform, you got zero. Here's why I'm going to rank it high and most people are not going to understand this. I think the skill of editing videos, if you get good at it, is up there with sales. So I'm going to have a controversial take even though I know AI in general is going to do the work. Understanding how to do it well, like selling, is actually a really important skill because I think the future of business or life is media, trust, distribution. Video editing is a great skill for that. And the AI tool is just going to make you better. That's where I'm putting it right behind A. Problem is you're not going to make a lot of money. So I got to work on— I'm still going to keep it up there. No, you're a piece of shit. Shit. Oh, that's the proper rating. I don't love it. I don't love this. It's just going to be less of the actual, like, doing and the editing part. It's going to be way more on the creative input and and the storylines and the ideation of it, this can be value. All right, next skill, lead generation. The art of getting attention, capturing some of that attention into a lead. A lead is a contact. It's an email, it's a phone number, it's a follow on social media. No leads, no sales, no business. Now the barrier of entry, it's still hard. Most people still don't know, even the ones that charge people to do lead gen, how to generate a lead. They think scraping a website and getting emails is fucking leads. No, it's not. To me, lead gen is having somebody raise their hand and say, "I have that problem and I'm interested in learning your solution." Defensibility, I still think even though AI will come and marketers will ruin things, the ability to shift and understand how to generate leads is always gonna be valuable. Does AI take over search? Yes. Does a person that knows how to use AI to generate leads, are they still valuable? Hell yeah. And then profitability, people will pay for opportunities. If you came to me and said, I have 15 people that said they want to learn from you and they're open to having conversation, I will pay for those opportunities. Less than a sale, but I will still pay for them. I'm going to put it behind sales. I think selling is a meta skill. Lead gen is a great skill, but if you actually had to pick one, go sales, you make more money. Lead gen, you'll still make a lot of money. Next skill, day trading. Oh yeah, I'm going to go there. Day trading is the ability for you to make bets on the stock market in a day based on your research or analysis of your candlesticks, which way the stock's going to go up, and hopefully pick the right direction and make money. It's probably one of the number one ways that people want to make money by working very little because they think they're going to make a lot of money for a little bit of time. They forget it's got the word day trading in it, meaning you have to work in that day to make a trade. And the promise is total freedom. Now I can understand the appeal— no boss, no schedule, just a laptop, traveling the world. Let's look at it from the point of AI. Barrier of entry. It's still hard to learn to make money. So the barrier of entry is high. The education is out there, but not a lot of people make money doing it. Defensibility. It's defensible today. Long term, I'm still uncertain what's going to happen in this world. And profitability. If you decide to master this skill, you can make profit. Okay, but it's like saying being a professional athlete or an entrepreneur. Most people in both those categories that play sports or go into business don't make money, same bucket. So in regards to like my recommendation for skills that people should go learn to make money, I'm not putting it very high. I'm literally gonna put it above SEO because SEO is essentially dead. Day trading is still a thing. F tier. All right, next skill, copywriting. The magical world of words. A copywriter's job is to get you to read the next sentence. That's it. Done well, world class, a single page of copy can generate millions of dollars for a business. So barrier of entry, easy to learn, a lot of education, AI supports it, you can learn it. Defensibility, you know, it's interesting because AI does a lot of copywriting, but I don't know if AI on its own can generate the kind of copy that converts at a high level yet. I think it's medium level defensibility. And then profitability, people are spending less and less money on copy because the default copy you get is good enough so they don't care about paying 5 or 10 grand for copy for a website when the copy that generated through AI is there. So again, it's like graphic design— the budget, the budget, the budget, the budget, the budgets. Because of that, I'm not going to rank it very high. It's D-tier behind graphic design. No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to flip it because when I think of where I'm spending money, I'm still spending money on copywriting. I'm spending more copywriting than media buying. Nope, I'm putting it D-tier at the front. Next skill, software development. Now, this one's near and dear to my heart. As a 17-year-old, I learned how to code. It literally saved my life. Whole backstory there. You can Google it. Google it. You can AI it. But let's talk about it. Okay. Building apps, building tools, building scripts. What's crazy is that it takes less time to build an app than it used to take to go in a meeting to talk about the app. In the last 6 months, AI has made it approachable to everyone. Barrier of entry, so approachable. Yesterday I had my 12 and 13-year-old at my office writing code in the meeting room. One built a website for his new business. The other one built the game. Neither of them knew how to write code. Easy peasy. Defensibility. I see AI coming for that role. The funny part is, is that it's less the developers that are going to have opportunities. The person knows how to build great product. That would mean it's not very defensible. And then profitability. The cost for engineering is dropping. So I think it's an incredible skill to learn. I think it's a lot of fun. I think you can make a lot of money and I think it's more approachable. And I'm actually going to put it in B tier right behind cybersecurity. I think cybersecurity and software development are similar. I just think people are going to pay more to not get scammed than they are to build apps that they can build themselves. Last but not least, the skill of AI automation. Automation is essentially taking a process, step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and getting the AI to run that process for you automagically. Back in the day, we used tools like Make and Zapier and N8N to do this, and everybody was talking about it and everybody was selling AI automation courses and I can do automation and I can do this for you and you and you. And all of a sudden agents came and nobody's talking about automation anymore. They're talking about agents. The truth is they're kind of all the same thing.. But in regards to just AI automation right now with AI, you can build your own AI automation by having the AI do it. So in regards to like learning how to do it, I still think it's hard. Most people don't understand like the infrastructure and the business systems and companies are still trying to figure out just how to chat with AI, let alone set up automations. Defensible, will AI come in and start automating more? Yes. So I think it's like a 4 outta 10 defensible. It's not very defensible. And then profitability, you can still make a lot of money helping companies do AI automation. Now what you do once you sell it, that's up to you. But are people paying to have somebody come in and AI automate things? Yes. In the business world, we call that a forward deployed engineer, okay? Where they're engineering business workflow and processes and automation essentially. I think in a year from now, people that understand automation will learn agents and agents will be the future. So I'm going to rank it in B tier, and that's B tier because I think of the defensibility. I think AI is going to build all the automations. I'm hoping you learn agents. I'm not sure if you will. And I just don't think people are going to pay a lot of money because every employee is going to know how to do this themselves. So what's funny is I didn't rank an S tier because I think AI is so disruptive that if you think that everything that could make you a lot of money is going to make you a lot of money for a long period of time and it's easy to learn, you're crazy. There's no world where it's easy to learn, defensible against AI, and is going to make you a lot of money. So I couldn't use S-tier because it's hard. If you look at a Forbes richest people list, most people made money building businesses, and it wasn't an option. So here's the truth: this might feel overwhelming, but all I'm going to ask you to do is spend more time in the AIs. Take this list and go like, ooh, AEO, that's interesting, or oh, cybersecurity, I've always thought that'd be fun. How would I learn it? Ask the AI to teach it to you. You can do this. I've watched young people do it all around me. I mentor a bunch of young people through my King's Club program. I teach them how to use AI to build these high-value skills. That's why I have firsthand experience on where the money is being made. And I know you can do it yourself. Now, I'm not saying to go try all of these. I'm just giving you some options so you can go be curious and know which direction to go in. My philosophy is simple. I will always disrupt myself before AI disrupts me. I want to use the AI to do stuff. I don't want the AI to be using me get shit done. So leave a comment and let me know which skill are you gonna go all in on this year to change your life? Comment below. And remember, if you want my Sell by Chat Playbook, just find me on Instagram and DM me @youtubesbc and I'll send it right over to you. Now that you know which skills are worth your time, here's the next move. If you wanna see how to build a $10 million solo AI business with zero code, click here and I'll see you on the other side.