Iman, an investor and advisor to a multi-billion dollar AI company, had a simple answer when Mark Tilbury asked him where the real money in AI was flowing. ‘Every business knows that they need to be using AI, but almost none of them know how to,’ he said, ‘which means that the real money goes to whoever can take these AI tools and put them to work for a business.’ That gap between knowing AI exists and knowing how to deploy it is the actual business opportunity, and the two sat down to rank seven concrete ways to close it.
The B-tier services that still pay well
The countdown opens at number seven with AI-enhanced property photos and walk-through videos. Real estate agents and Airbnb hosts are sitting on rushed phone pictures with bad lighting, and most of them know those images are costing them inquiries. A few dollars in AI image credits run through a platform like Higgsfield can turn those shots into something that looks like a professional shoot. The real upsell is a cinematic walk-through video generated from the same photos, which does the first viewing for the agent and filters out buyers who would not have liked the layout anyway. Pricing lands around $100 per package with costs of only a few dollars in credits, and a roster of regular clients can push monthly revenue to between $5,000 and $10,000. The window is open now because most people have not yet realized how good AI photo and video generation has become. It earns a B-tier ranking because time is still the bottleneck: more clients means more hours.
Number six is lead reactivation. Every local dentist, gym, roofer, or med spa has hundreds, sometimes thousands, of old leads sitting in a spreadsheet, people who once raised their hand and were never followed up with. Loading that list into a platform like HighLevel, having Claude draft natural-sounding texts (‘Hey Sarah, it’s Bright Smiles Dental. We came across your details from a while back. Are you still interested to get that checkup sorted?’), and then letting the platform’s conversation AI handle replies and booking turns dead data into booked appointments. The payment model is performance-based, anywhere from $50 to a couple of hundred dollars per appointment that shows up, and AI handling the conversations means taking on more clients does not consume every waking hour. Setup takes about a week to learn properly. It lands in B tier alongside the property idea: more established than the photo service, but setup is heavier and the compliance rules around texting vary by country.
Number five is AI chatbot installation for local businesses. Most small operations answer the same questions hundreds of times. ‘Where’s my order? What’s your returns policy? Are you open on Sunday?’ A properly configured bot built on a tool like Chatbase, trained on the business’s own website and FAQ documents, with explicit guardrails telling it to flag a human when it does not know something, solves that loop entirely. The critical step most people skip is rigorous testing before handoff. A bot that invents an answer is worse than no bot at all. The income model is a one-off setup fee plus a monthly retainer for updates. Competition here is medium to high because the tools are easy to buy directly, but most deployed chatbots are set up badly, which keeps the quality gap wide. Another B-tier finish.
Number four is AI website revamps for local businesses. Most owners know their site looks like it was built in 2003 and does not work on a phone, but finding a designer and waiting weeks is too painful, so they leave it. A quick Google Maps search for ‘gardeners in Kent’ turns up dozens of candidates in minutes. Feeding the business’s services, hours, and reviews into a modern AI website builder produces a full layout with text and images in one session. The demo in the session placed the old and new versions side by side and the difference was stark enough that Tilbury called it ‘a night and day difference.’ A rebuild runs a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars for the client, far below agency rates, and a monthly hosting and maintenance fee converts a one-off job into recurring income. It landed between B and C tier, the only item on the board to break the ranking format, because it is a crowded space and mostly one-off work unless a monthly relationship is built.
The A-tier plays that reward the people who go deeper
Number three is content repurposing for creators and podcasters. Long-form creators already know they should be turning weekly episodes into newsletters, short clips, and LinkedIn posts, but pasting a transcript into ChatGPT produces generic robotic output nobody wants to read. The service worth paying for is a dedicated Claude project named after the client, loaded with their existing writing, and given precise instructions that reproduce their actual voice. From one transcript, a properly configured project can output a newsletter, short-form scripts, an X post, and a LinkedIn post in minutes. Prospecting is simple: find a creator with a strong podcast but no newsletter, repurpose one of their recent episodes as a free sample, and send it over. Monthly retainers run from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars per client depending on volume and quality. The tools cost a QuillBot subscription and a transcription service, both covered by a single client. It earns A tier because the setup is simple and quality control is the actual product.
Number two is AI-generated UGC ads for brands running on TikTok and Instagram. Before AI, producing user-generated content ads meant shipping products to creators, waiting for footage, and paying editors. Now a single afternoon on a laptop can produce more than ten ad variations using a tool like Higgsfield: upload a product image and an avatar, describe the action and script, and generate. The demo produced a lip plumper review ad where a woman on her bed holds the product up, applies it, and delivers lines in natural spoken cadence. Brands pay real UGC creators $100 or more per single video, and a monthly retainer for a set number of ads can run a few thousand dollars per client. Iman, who ran a marketing agency before his advisory work, placed this at A tier for potential with a specific warning attached: making a nice-looking ad is fast, but making an ad that stops the scroll requires learning hooks, angles, and audience psychology. It is the most crowded idea on the board and also the one with the highest earning ceiling.
The S-tier idea, the one both Iman and Tilbury agreed they would choose if starting from zero today with everything they now know about AI, was held back from this ranking and reserved for a separate five-day event called the AI Income Challenge.
The one answer Iman would not give away cheaply
Highsfield’s lip plumper avatar, mid-thumbs-up, looped silently in the preview window after the session ended.
Six of the seven ideas on the board can be started this week with a laptop and a subscription. The debate that ran underneath all of them was the same one: the tools are accessible, the gap is in knowing how to deploy them for a specific business and being willing to do the quality-control work that the people who just paste transcripts into ChatGPT will always skip.
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