I Ranked Every AI Offer From Worst to Best

We're going to be going over and ranking the nine AI business models that you probably seen online at this point. Now we're going to talk about which of these models are actually good and actually making money. We're going to talk about which ones suck and are a complete waste of time and are going to be a race to the bottom and you're not going to make any money doing them. So we're going to rank them from S tier all the way to F tier by the end of this video. You're going to know exactly which business models you should follow to make money selling AI in 2026 and beyond. So let's start off with AI assessments. All right. Now, what is an AI assessment? An AI assessment is when you basically get paid to do discovery with a local business owner or a business owner in general. So my favorite form of AI assessment and these can take many different forms is called an AI tools assessment. Now this is where a business owner pays me $1,000. We sit down for 45 minutes and we talk about, are we basically figure out what in their business is causing them pain? What is manual? What is taking a lot of time? Where does work tend to pile up? What have they tried to automate in the past and failed? And the deliverable for an AI assessment is basically a report that says, hey, here's all your pain points. Here's everything you're doing manually. Here's where AI can fit into your business. And that is my favorite offer by far. That's the single AI offer that I've sold the most of in the last year. It's made most of the money that I made selling AI services come from assessments. The other reason I love assessments is they can take a lot of different flavors. So I've got another video coming soon talking about the six different types of AI assessments you can sell. There's not just one type. And they're the perfect foot in the door offer. So when somebody pays you $1,000 for an AI assessment, it's so much easier to upsell them on a higher ticket offers after the assessment. And better yet, you can even credit every dollar they paid to you for the assessment. So if you charge $1,000 for the assessment and you uncover all these other things you can do for them, you can tell them, hey, if you move forward with me on the next offer, then I'm just going to credit the $1,000 you paid me for the assessment towards that next service. So it becomes an absolute no-brainer. So for that reason, we're going to be putting AI assessments in the S tier. This is by far, in my opinion, the easiest thing to sell. It's the thing that requires the least experience on this entire list. Anybody can sell it. You really don't even need to know much about AI. Because the AI can tell you where the business owner client can be using AI. Like it's not that hard to sell an AI assessment. And for anybody that wants, I actually the template that I use to deliver the AI assessment report to clients. I've open sourced that you can go to audit template.ai and download the actual report template that I use to deliver the $1,000 assessment to clients. Now the next one that we're going to talk about are AI lead gen systems. Now what is an AI lead gen system? So this is going to be a cold outbound system that can be powered by AI to deliver leads to your clients on a consistent basis. The most common iteration of this is going to be something like a cold email agency. Or like a LinkedIn ghost writing agency or any sort of cold outbound automation offer. Now what I like about AI lead gen systems is your directly, like your offer is directly tied to revenue. It's very easy for the client to tell whether it is worth it to keep paying you every month or not. So if you're new to selling AI lead gen systems, I see a lot of people sell like cold email offers or cold email systems. And the reason that's a compelling offer is because there's a lot of infrastructure required to set up cold email properly. If you do it wrong, your deliverability is going to take a hit like your, you know, your emails are going to go to spam or you're not, they're not going to get delivered. And it costs you maybe a couple hundred bucks to set up the infrastructure. But you're going to be able to generate a consistent amount of leads for your clients every month. You can do this on a pay for performance basis in the early stages. If you are, you know, new to this offer. So if you don't have any case studies or you don't have any testimonials, you can simply tell the client like, look, you can pay me like a really small one time setup feed just so I can set up the system one time. And then you only pay me if I bring in leads. So for every lead you bring in, you know, maybe charge them like 10% of what their average client value is. So their average deal size is 5K. Then maybe you charge them, you know, 500 bucks per lead that your system generates. That should more than be worth it for your client. So when it comes to AI Legion systems, again, there's a lot of different flavors. If you're good at these types of systems, you can productize them very easy as well. So if you get good at installing and standing up cold email systems, for example, you can easily go and replicate that across multiple clients with not much additional time invested. So for that reason, I really like AI Legion systems. I'm putting them in the A tier. It's beginner friendly. It is very productizable. It directly ties to revenue. You can scale relatively quickly. I really like AI Legion systems. Now the next offer in our stack here is AI automation agency. So you'll notice that this is just like a general business model. It's not even so much an offer, but I wanted to include it on this list because I absolutely hate it. 100% is going in the F tier because of the fact that everybody and their mother in 2026 is trying to start an AI automation agency. The reason I hate it is because they're commoditized. You're competing with every other company calling themselves an AI automation agency. You're not specialized. You're not in a specific niche. You're not offering a specific project or product. You're just taking any sort of AI or automation work that comes your way. When you do that, it becomes very hard to scale because you're stuck doing custom work so you can't productize anything. It's very difficult to hire because every project is different. You cannot get a premium price for your product because you're commoditized. It's just the worst way to position yourself. So for that reason, I'm putting AI automation agency in the F tier. Next we've got AI Concierge. Now, AI Concierge is kind of like hourly consulting, but it's packaged in a very different way. So we're going to talk about these at the same time. We're going to compare and contrast them. So AI Concierge is what I teach people to become inside our AI operator academy community, which you can check out at a.com community or at the link in the description below. AI Concierge is how I'm personally making over $1,000 an hour. I'm actually making about $1,200 an hour consulting and helping business owners implement AI. Now the difference between AI Concierge and hourly consulting is that when you're selling hourly consulting, you are literally just selling an hour of your time for a dollar figure and that is it. So if you're selling hourly consulting, maybe you can get $200, $250, $300 per hour, but nobody is going to pay you $1,000 an hour for one hour of your time if that's all they're getting. The reason that we're able to get over $1,000 an hour as an AI Concierge is how we package it and how we position it. So what makes AI Concierge different is it is done with you consulting, right? So think about it this way. There's a lot of business owners out there who know they need AI. They know they need to automate certain parts of their business, but they don't know where to start. So for those people, what we'll do is we will sell them an AI assessment first to figure out what it is that they actually need. And once we have the results of the assessment, then we have a list of, okay, here's all the ways that AI can help you in your business. And most business owners don't necessarily want to go off and pay an agency $10,000 or $15,000 or however much they'll have to pay for the agency to build on the system and install it into their business because the business owner doesn't know how it works, like they're not any smarter because of that. And if it breaks, the business owner is not equipped to fix it. What business owners actually want, what I found out in doing this business for the last year is they actually want somebody who knows a little bit to hold their hand and teach them how to implement AI. They want somebody to do it with them. And that's what AI Concierge is. So when we're in AI Concierge, technically, we're just doing hourly consulting but we're positioning it through the lens of, hey, you're not just paying me for an hour of my time. When you pay me to be an AI Concierge, you're going to pay me $2,000 a month and we're going to have $2,45 minute Zoom calls per month where we're going to get on the call together. You Mr. Client, you're going to share your screen and you were going to, and I'm going to teach you, I'm going to tell you where to click, what to type, what to prompt. And basically, we're going to spend that time together automating different processes in your business. And usually that just involves turning them into skills, right? Turning them into cloud skills and teaching them how to use cloud and cloud co-work. And they're going to pay me $2,000 a month, multiple, multiple months in a row to help them continue doing that. Now, the biggest pushback that I get around this model is, well, hey, aren't people just going to, like, if you teach them how to do this stuff, aren't they just going to stop paying you after, like, two months, and what you find is that the opposite is true. I even had, I tell my clients all the time, I'm like, you could literally fire me today because you already know what to do. The reason they don't fire me after four, five, six months is because by paying me $2,000 a month to work with them, it is forced accountability for them, right? When they're paying me $2,000 a month, they know that we are going to sit down together Twice a month and. build AI implementations. We're actually going to automate parts of their business. If they weren't paying me for that, they would never get around to doing it. So it's a forcing function to make them do what they need to do in terms of AI and automating things in their business. That is why we can charge $2,000 a month for AI concierge for an hour and a half of our time, where if we're just selling hourly consulting, we can barely charge $300 an hour. So for that reason, AI concierge goes into S tier for every reason that I mentioned above. There's literally no other business model on planet earth where you can make over $1,000 an hour without a college degree and with about 30 days of training. Nowhere else can you do that. I will go to my grave saying that other than being an AI concierge. And then if you do hourly consulting, I'm putting that in the D tier for obvious reasons. You're commoditized. You can only charge so much money. You're at most going to make $300 an hour and you're capped by the amount of hours that you can work. And like I said earlier, if you are interested in learning how to sell AI assessments as a foot in the door and then upsell people to AI concierge where I'm currently making over $1,000 an hour. I teach people how to do all of that and more how to find clients, etc. Inside AI operator academy. Again, that is a o a dot community or hit the link in the description. Next, we've got AI workshops. Now, I really, really like the AI workshops model and I'll tell you why. So I had a guy on my channel recently his name is Mark. So that episode was, you know, by the time you're watching this, probably a week or two ago. And what I love about Mark's model is he does two different kinds of AI workshops. So one kind of workshop is where he is kind of opening it to the public and making it lower ticket. So the first one that he did, he put basically put an event on eventbrite.com and said like, Hey, you know, AI workshop come in for a half day and I'll teach you how to use AI or, you know, leverage AI in your business made it 500 bucks ahead. He went on LinkedIn and hit up a bunch of people on LinkedIn and invited them and, you know, posted about it on social media or whatever. And he got like 17 people to show up. Each of those people chart, you know, paid him 500 bucks. So he made good money for a half day of his time. But what he's doing now, which is a lot higher level, is he's approaching companies that are like, you know, five, 10, $50 million companies. And he's offering to do workshops for very specific teams or very specific departments inside these companies where he can charge 15, 20 or 25k for a half day workshop or for a one to two day workshop. And what he's finding is that when he's doing these workshops for these companies, he's able to find additional needs that they have where he can upsell them on custom built systems to solve their actual problems. So he's actually got two six figure proposals on the table right now for companies where he's going to come and do a workshop and some custom builds for more than 100k a piece. And this is a solo operator like this is literally pure profit for him. So for that reason, I think AI workshops is a great model. I love anything having to do with in person. It's harder to scale because obviously you need to be in person for it. It does require more expertise like if you're brand new to selling AI to making money with AI, you're not going to start with AI workshops. But for all the earlier reasons that I mentioned, this is definitely in B tier. And if you can scale this, I would even put it in A tier. Now next, we've got AI voice agents. So AI voice agents are probably one of the more popular offers I see people talking about on Instagram and on YouTube. And you know, you're getting ads for people who are trying to go and sell voice agents to local businesses. And that's all great. Like a lot of local businesses could use a voice agent. Like they could definitely benefit from that service. Think about it. Any local service business HVAC plumber locksmith like Trishin, like Rufur, you name it. If you call them up and the phone goes to voicemail, which for 70% of them, the phone will go to voicemail. They need an A voice agent, right? Because that voice agent can always be capturing those leads where you're not available to pick up where voice agents go wrong is in how people build them, right? I've seen people I've had personal experiences calling service companies and talking to AI voice agents. I've had some experiences that were fantastic. I've had other experiences that were god awful. Now the worst ones and I'm sure those of you watching this have probably experienced this to a degree before. It's like you call a service business. You're talking to a voice agent. It's not understanding you. It's cutting you off. It's refusing to hand you off to a human. And it's all around a terrible experience. I'd say that's like 70% of voice agents. And not only does that make the the client look bad, but it makes you as the person who sold the voice agent who built the voice agent makes you look like you have no idea what you're doing. And I think building voice agents is a lot harder than most people realize. This is not something where you can just spend up a template. Drop it in an HFAC business and charge 5K for it. There are so many different edge cases. There are so many different things you need to account for when building voice agents to make sure that they don't say what they're not supposed to say. And they do say what they are supposed to say. So for that reason and the way that these are marketed, I'm going to put these in the seat here. Again, there's a big need for them, but a lot of people are selling them. Largely commoditized. A lot of people aren't yet ready to listen to the pitch, like a lot of these service businesses and trades aren't yet ready to hear it. So I think a year or two from now, especially as the technology improves, that's going to be a much sexier offer for the people that know how to build them right. Next, we've got managed agents. So managed agents is another thing that I've talked about on the channel a few times. I've had Nick Vasilesky on the channel twice who this is his entire business model selling managed agents. I've had Phil on the channel. This was about a month or two ago who also sells managed agents like this is a fantastic offer for creating a recurring revenue, but it's not a beginner friendly offer. So what is a managed agent at the end of the day? A managed agent is when you build an AI agent that essentially acts as an employee in your client's business that does a very specific task or a very specific set of tasks on repeat the same way every time. So for example, one of Nick's managed agents that he sold to an insurance agency client is essentially an employee that sits inside that insurance agency and does one very specific function for that insurance agency. I want to say it was like claims processing. So he built this claims processing agent sits inside the insurance agency. It processes claims from policy holders all day long. This is a process that previously a human would have to do. A human that would cost 60, 70, 80,000 dollars a year, not including benefits, not including you know, sick time, not including maternity leave, not including all the times they're going to get things wrong and show up late. Nick charged his five grand a month for an AI version of that employee who's going to get it right every time. And what I love about managed agents is that it creates the opportunity to go and sell business to business to business because what Nick has done in particular is he sells managed agents to his client and his client the insurance agency for example can then turn around and resell his managed agent to all their insurance agency owner buddies. So while Nick might be charging his client five grand a month, his client might turn around and charge, you know, three grand a month to all their buddies and then Nick's able to get a cut of that as well. So this becomes very scalable very quickly, especially if you have very deep industry expertise. So if you were a an insurance agent or if you were a realtor, if you were a you know, plumber or whatever, you are very well positioned to create a man create and manage an agent that does a very specific part of that business very well. Go off and sell it for 5K a month that is you have 10 clients you're killing it like you're doing very well. So for that reason, I'm putting managed agents in the A tier. This is not a beginner friendly model. It takes some sales skills. It takes some technical skills to pull off. You don't need to be a developer, but you need to be dangerous with the latest tools and manage agents is a really good business model in my opinion. Now lastly, we have knowledge base builds. So what is a knowledge base? This is the context layer that AI agents or that the AI tools inside of business are going to sit on top of and pull their context from. So think about it. Most companies, really every company is using a host of different tools. They're using Google Drive, they're using Dropbox, they're using Gmail, they're using Slack, they're using WhatsApp, they've got a CRM, they've got a project management tool, and none of these tools talk to each other. Most people are having to go and get data from, you know, they've got to go look through Slack for a message and then they've got to pull a piece of data from the CRM and then they got to go check their email for another piece. So bottom line most companies data is completely scattered. It's in a bunch of different repositories. So what a knowledge base build does and my friend Adam Sandler who I've had on the channel as well, this is his whole business model. He builds and sells knowledge bases to companies. What a good knowledge base does is it consolidates that data. It basically acts as like the central repository that pulls in data from all those tools that I just mentioned. And then an AI agent sits on top of that repository and you communicate with the company communicates with the AI agent to ask questions about their own data. So for example, you know, imagine being being able to ask your CRM. The last three years of your CRM data. Hey, what are our biggest miss sales opportunities? Or imagine being able to ask AI, "Hey, what are the biggest bottlenecks in our fulfillment process?" And it can go and read through all your Slack messages, your CRM, your project management, your email, everything and tell you, "Oh, well, you know, based on your last two years of customer onboarding, these are the biggest bottlenecks, right?" So it'll give you insights that you didn't even know you could get and that you literally couldn't get otherwise. So company knowledge bases are not a beginner-friendly model, right? They're also not incredibly difficult to build, but you do need to keep in mind things like data security, where is the data going to live, how is the agent going to access it, how is it going to be stored? This is a model that takes a little bit more technical expertise than probably all the other ones on this list, but it is very product-tizable, right? So you can do a knowledge-based assessment. We've sold those assessments for two grand before all day. To figure out where does the knowledge live, where do the opportunities lie to consolidate the knowledge within a business, and then you can actually build the knowledge base. You could charge 5, 10, 15, 25K or more, and there's a lot of upsell opportunities on top of that, because when you build a knowledge base, imagine being able to go and ask the knowledge base, "Hey, what are the biggest gaps that this client still has that I could build for them next?" And it can literally give you all the things you can upsell the client next. So for that reason, I'm going to put knowledge-based builds in the B tier, because of the fact that they're more technical, but they unlock a lot of additional upsell opportunities, and they are very sticky. Clients are not going to want to move off their knowledge base once you build it, and they understand the full power of it. So that's a full AI-offer tier list. To summarize, we've got AI assessments and AI concierge and S tier, AI lead-gen systems and manage agents in the A tier, AI workshops and knowledge-based builds in the B tier, voice agents in the C tier, hourly consulting in the D tier and AI automation agency in the F tier. If you want to learn how to make money with the S tier offers on this list, being AI assessments and AI concierge, join AI operator academy at a.o.a.community or hit the link in the description. And as a reminder, if you want the exact template that I use to deliver $999 or AI assessments, you can grab that template completely free at audittemplate.ai.