Be The Local
AI Person

This might be one of the best ways to make money with AI right now, and almost nobody is doing it.

Almost everyone learning AI is trying to become an online consultant or creator, competing for the same followers and the same clients. Meanwhile a huge opening is forming where almost no one is looking: your own town.

Local owners like the plumber, the dentist and the boutique know AI matters. They don’t want another online course at 9pm after running their business all day.

They want someone in the room, showing them how to do it with their own tools and their own problems. That’s a different offer from a $49 video course, and almost nobody is providing it. The numbers back it up.

One caveat. These are owners from Goldman’s 10,000 Small Businesses program, so they’re more engaged than average. The typical shop on your main street is probably further behind, which is good news for you. That gap between "using it" and "good at it" is your whole business.

The model is simple. You run paid in-person workshops for local business owners.

1. $99 a ticket, 30 people a session is about $3,000 per workshop.
2. Two or three workshops a month is roughly $6,000 to $9,000 a month before costs like the room and snacks.
3. Then the retainer. A handful of owners will want you to keep helping. Put them on a monthly retainer as their on-call AI person, the one who sets up their tools, builds their automations and answers their questions.

Trenton’s post prices that retainer at $1,500 a month. Twenty-five retainer clients is $37,500 a month, or $450,000 a year, and two workshops a month adds about $72,000 a year on top. That’s the $500K headline. It’s a ceiling to build toward over time, not a first-year promise, and you might start the retainer lower while you build proof.

The one honest catch is that you can’t teach this until you can do it yourself. You don’t need to be a developer. You do need to be good at the practical stuff, like setting up Claude, building simple automations and solving a real business problem live in front of someone.

That’s a learnable skill, and it’s exactly what I teach. Once you can build AI systems for yourself, teaching a local owner is the easy part. Do it for yourself first, then do it for everyone else in your town.

This prompt turns Claude into a strategist for this exact business. Fill in where you live and what you’re good at, and it maps out the whole plan with you.

1. Use it once. Paste the prompt into a new chat in Claude or ChatGPT, fill in the [brackets], and send. Answer its 3 follow-up questions and it revises the plan.
2. Keep it. In Claude, make a Project, click Set project instructions, paste it in and save. Every chat in that Project starts with it. In ChatGPT, do the same with a Project’s instructions.