Speaker 1AI automation sucks. And if you're looking to start an AI automation agency, my advice is just don't. Most people here think there's still a market for selling automations to small business owners. But the truth is that gold rush opportunity that the gurus are still pitching you is already long gone. Builds that sold for $10,000 just a few years ago are now being done by kids in the Philippines for literally 500 bucks a pop. And what is going on in the AI space is a story that's already happened before just a few short years ago. I'm going to explain why the current AI agency model is completely dead and what you should be doing instead. I've already seen this play out once before. I watched this exact story play out from 2020 to about 2025 in the Amazon FBA space. And the exact same thing is happening to AI automation agencies today in 2026 and beyond. So I'm going to show you why this is probably the worst opportunity right now, why it's exactly like what happened in the past. And I'm going to show you why it's exactly like what happened in the past. And I'm going to tell you the better alternative in 2026 and beyond. So why should you listen to me? Well, I'm making this comparison to the world of Amazon because I spent nine years there. I sold over $16 million worth of products on Amazon. I've sold over a million dollars worth of information products from courses, coaches, coaching, consulting, masterminds, etc. I built an Amazon FBA community to $340,000 in recurring revenue, sold that, and I've spoken on stages nationwide. So I know what's going on. I've spoken on stages nationwide. I'm talking about when I see this trend that was a thing in the Amazon world, and it's now starting to happen in the world of AI. So if any of you have been around the make money online space for the last four or five plus years, you've heard the Amazon FBA pitches. Amazon went from a literal gold rush to 5% margins over the course of about two years. So at its peak, there were 1000 plus new Amazon seller accounts being created every single day. This was in around 2004, which is right around the peak. I knew kids that were literally buying fake Nike socks off of Alibaba, turning around reselling them on Amazon making $10,000 a month in profit. And because of this Amazon clamped down on what they allowed on their platform, they raise fees every single year. So now if you're still selling on Amazon using the business model that I use, which was called Amazon wholesale, you're making if you're lucky a five to 7% net margin at scale, hoping that you can make up for it in volume. Now, same thing is happening in the AI space, the model companies are continuing to charge more, your margins getting squeezed out, we're going to talk about why that is. So again, it's the same movie being repeated over and over again, back in, you know, from 2020 to 2023. The pitch was, hey, sell on Amazon, you can get rich. It's the same pitch happening in from 2024 to 2026. In the AI space, start an AI agency, get rich, make these huge margins. Back then there were 1000 new Amazon sellers a day. Nowadays, any anybody that has an innate in, you know, anybody that has an innate in account or a cloud account that's watched one YouTube tutorial can go out there and start an AI agency, the bottom line is there's zero barrier to entry. So supply of of agencies increases, demand stays the same, and prices have to come down. Now, nowadays, there's freelancers overseas that are willing to charge $500 to build these fancy automations that just two years ago, people were charging 510 25k for and I think the biggest parallel is the platform risk. So back when you were selling on Amazon, Amazon raises the fees every single year, you have no control over your overhead a lot of times. And the same thing's happening now. With anthropic and open AI, the only difference is now anthropic and open AI are building the automations and the things that you're selling. They're literally building those capabilities into the model with things like skills with things like cloud co work with things like cloud code. And because of that, you're not going to be able to sell all of your services, you're not going to be able to sell all of your services, you're not going to be able to is racing to zero. Now there's four rules of a commodity market that again, you're not going to hear people say on YouTube, because a lot of these people want you to start an AI automation agency, they want you to sell AI services, and I want you to sell AI services, but they're very specific AI services that are not commoditized, that are actually becoming more popular and more high quarter, I guess you're able to charge a higher price for these particular services as the models get better. So that's one of the things that I think is really important. And I think that's better. And we'll talk about what those are here shortly. So the four rules of a commodity market that again, I learned in my Amazon FBA days that I'm seeing play out in real time here in the AI space is that the newest seller sets the price. So back in the Amazon days, the kid that was willing to sell at a loss just to win what's called the buy box on Amazon is the guy who sets the price. Nowadays, the guy who sets the price is the 19 year old kid or the person in the Philippines with an N8N account, because you're always going to be racing against them when it comes to pricing. Second is when the build cost hits zero, the build price is going to follow. So nowadays, it's so incredibly cheap to build a cost almost nothing. Claude can literally build workflows for you now. So it's we're shifting away from paying for the build. And now people are paying for the outcome and they're paying for the relationship and the guidance and the coaching and the consulting that you can provide them. And we'll get into what those offers are here shortly. And the biggest signal of when we're seeing the top of the market is the course boom. So in the Amazon FBA world, you saw everybody and their mother selling an Amazon course anywhere from like 2021 to 2023. And this was as margins are coming down. And you're seeing the same thing play out in the AI agency world right now. These courses are peaking, right? It's at its peak, everyone and their mother has a course on how to start AI automation, which is when you know that margins are starting to come down and this market is at a peak. The fourth phase is that every build you ship ends up becoming a liability. So if it breaks, if you build something for your client, and it breaks, they're going to call you. And sure, you could be charging them like every month for a maintenance retainer. But what you're basically telling them is like, hey, I'm not confident in my work. So because of that, you're going to have to keep paying me every month so that if and when it breaks, I will come in and fix it. And that's not a very good business model in my mind. So again, comparing this to the days of Amazon FBA, who actually won on Amazon through all the commoditization through all the platform fees increasing like who are the winners? Who are the people today that are still crushing it on Amazon? It's the people who had and have exclusive relationships with high quality brands. These are the people that put relationships first. They're the ones who actually own the brand who control the supply chain and control the product. And these are the people that have exclusive distribution deals that other people can't undercut them. And notice how all of these things, these three factors, three or four factors that I just mentioned, they come down to relationships, distribution, and exclusivity, right? And on the other hand, if you're commoditizing yourself in the Amazon space, you're selling the same products as everybody else. And the same thing in the AI world, if you're commoditizing yourself as an AI agency, you're selling the same builds and the same processes and the same automations that everybody else is selling. They can't tell you from the automation agency down the street. And because of that, nobody's willing to pay you premium prices, makes it very difficult to scale, you have to do custom work, and you just don't make any money doing that. What is the solution in this case? Well, the solution is we stop selling automation. And the reason we stop selling automation and we stop positioning ourselves this way is when you go to a business owner and say, Hey, I run an AI automation agency, I can come in and automate your business processes. They don't care. Business owners, at the end of the day, they don't want automation necessarily. What they want is an outcome. And an AI automation agency sells a build that the business owner can't see. So if it breaks, they've got to call you to come fix it. And they had no insight into what you actually built. That's more of a liability than it is an actual benefit to the business owner, even if you save them a couple of hours a week. With that build. You're also tend to be replaced by the next auto the next model update. So when you position yourself as an AI automation agency, as the models get better, your business actually becomes less valuable, which is a terrible position to be in. The position you want to be in is, instead of fighting against the current swim with the current because you want to be in a position and you want to run a business where the better the models get, the more valuable your service becomes. And that's not possible with an AI automation agency. That is possible if you position yourself as an AI concierge. Now, what is an AI concierge? Well, I've got probably 30 different videos on my channel and on my podcast, talking about what an AI concierge is. But in a little bit, I'm going to talk about what an AI concierge is. And I'm going to talk about what an AI concierge is. So instead of me talking to a business owner and saying, Hey, Mr. Business owner, I can come in and build you all these fancy AI automations, and then I drop them into your business. And then when they break, you're going to pay me to come fix them. No, instead, an AI concierge is a partner with the business owner that says, Hey, Mr. Business owner, I can come in, I can sit next to you in your office, or we can get on a zoom call. And we can go through your business together. And let's sit down and uncover the opportunities that AI can create in your business. And when we find those opportunities, I will work with you to build these opportunities into your business so that you're not just left with a black box, you actually get the skill, I'm going to teach you the skill of building, and you're going to get the outcome that comes with that. So not only am I going to give you fish, but I'm also going to teach you how to fish. That is what makes an AI concierge different from the guy pitching AI automation services. you're teaching the owner to be able to repeat the outcomes every single month. And people hearing this might think, well, that makes no sense because isn't the owner just going to fire you as soon as they know how to build these things, like as soon as you teach them and coach them? And the answer is absolutely not. The more you teach them and the more you coach them, the more solid that relationship gets, the more they trust you, and the more they lean on you as an AI partner, as someone who can continue to create outcomes in their business versus just an AI automation vendor who comes in, build something, leaves, it breaks, now I got to pay you to fix it. And as an AI concierge, me personally, I'm making over $1,200 an hour. That's not an exaggeration. Over $1,200 an hour as an AI concierge building with small business owners, consulting with small business owners to implement AI into their business. Now, if we look at how the actual dollars per hour breaks down, let's look at three different AI opportunities right now. And compare how much money you're actually going to make and the dollars per hour. So if you're selling one-off automation builds, which is what everybody else on the internet is telling you to do, they're telling you to build an AI automation agency, in terms of price, well, guess what? The cheapest bid is going to win. So if you're not the absolute cheapest price that that business owner has been quoted, you're going to lose that deal. In terms of how much time it's going to take you to implement, usually because these are custom builds, these are taking you hours, like 10, 20, 30 hours to implement, plus you're going to have to maintain them forever. If you're building custom systems, you're always going to be on the hook for maintenance. Even if you're charging them for maintenance, you're basically charging them because you didn't do a good job and they're going to have to come to you for months and years to come. Nobody wants that. And your effective hourly rate literally gets lower by the month. Now, if you're selling what we call an AI tools assessment, which we recommend selling as like the first foot in the door offer to a new client, instead of coming in and saying, hey, I'm going to sell you this automation build. You come in and say, hey, I'm going to sell you an assessment for $1,000. And what that assessment is going to do is it is going to uncover all the opportunity areas in your business where AI can provide an outcome. And I'm not going to implement any of those outcomes as part of the assessment. The assessment is just going to tell you what's possible. And I've sold about 26 of those assessments so far in 2026 for about $1,000 a pop. They're the easiest sell in the world. We're not implementing anything. We're not coding anything. We're literally just sitting down with the business owner. Uncovering where AI opportunity exists in their business and then delivering a report telling them, hey, here is what you can do. And the AI concierge that we just talked about is when we sit down with them and implement with them what we found during the assessment. So for an AI assessment, it's going to take us about two hours to fulfill in total. Again, I've got lots of videos, lots of podcast episodes talking about what is an AI tools assessment? How do we fulfill it? Literally today, as of the day of this recording, just posted a video on YouTube of me fulfilling an AI assessments. You can see what that actually looks like in real time. So your effective hourly rate when you're selling AI assessments is about $500 an hour. That's significantly more than you're ever going to make selling one-off automation builds. And then the top tier of the ladder are those AI concierge retainers that we mentioned. So we're going to be charging anywhere from one to $2,000 a month as an AI concierge. You can even charge more than that. I have people inside my community. One guy. Last week, he just landed a $7,500 a month fractional chief AI officer engagement and another one for 6,500 a month. So he's actually charging literally three, three and a half times what I charge as an AI concierge. He's positioning it as a fractional chief AI officer, but the roles and the duties are virtually the same. So as an AI concierge, we're spending about an hour and a half per month as part of this engagement. And because of that, our hourly rate, if we're charging $2,000 a month is about $1,200 an hour. Now, remember the reason that we're able to get this done in about an hour and a half per month is because we're just doing two 45 minute calls with the business owner every month. We're not doing anything for them. We're doing these things with them and we do these things with them. We help them implement on these calls. Now, we also have some free resources in the description of this video or of this podcast. If you're interested in starting your own AI assessment or AI concierge business, grab the free resources. Yeah. We've got free resources in the description. We've got like mini courses, we've got playbooks, we've got so much free additional content that goes a lot deeper on those two business models and you can get that for free at the link in the description. Now, in terms of next steps, the next steps are simple. Take the word automation out of your offer this week. Never mention it again because business owners do not care about automation. They care about outcomes and as an AI concierge, we work with them to create outcomes every single month. We teach them how to create those outcomes in their business. So rewrite your offer to leave with a $999 AI assessment, not a build. And then once you've delivered the assessment, then you can upsell those clients on an AI concierge engagement, at which point you'll be making at least $1,000 per hour in terms of your effective hourly rate. And if you want to learn how to implement these business models at scale, we've got a community called AI Operator Academy. You can go to AOA. Community or hit the link in the description below. We've got about 315 people inside the community who are learning how to implement these this as a business model, right? They're learning how to sell AI assessments, they're implementing AI concierge engagements. If you don't land your first paying client in 90 days or less inside the community, we literally refund every dollar you spent to join us. So join us there if you want to turn this into a real business for everybody watching. Thank you. And I'll be back soon.
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