Be The Local
AI Person

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

Every person learning AI is trying to become an online consultant or content creator, all crowding into the same tiny corner of the internet, competing with each other for the same followers and the same clients. Meanwhile, a huge opening is forming somewhere almost no one is looking: your own town.

Here's the thing about local small business owners: the plumber, the dentist, the boutique, the law office, the gym. They know AI matters. They just don't want to sit through another online course at 9pm after a full day of running their business.

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

That's from a 2026 Goldman Sachs survey of over 1,200 small businesses. They want in, they know they need help, and only a sliver have figured it out. Honestly, I think the real number who need hands-on help is closer to 95%. That gap between "using it" and "actually good at it" is your entire business.

Here's the model, and why the headline number isn't clickbait. You run paid in-person workshops for local business owners. Keep it simple:

Two or three workshops a month is already a strong income. But the real leverage is the back end: after a workshop, a handful of those 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. Stack enough of those and you've built a real, recurring, genuinely lucrative business. The math really does check out.

Here's the one honest catch: you can't teach this until you can do it yourself. You don't need to be a developer, but you do need to be genuinely good at the practical stuff, setting up Claude, building simple agents and automations, solving a real business problem live in front of someone.

The good news is that's a learnable skill, and it's exactly the thing I teach. Once you can build AI systems for yourself, teaching a local business owner to do the same is the easy part. Do it for yourself first, then do it for everyone else in your town.

To make this concrete, I built you a prompt that turns Claude into a strategist for this exact business. Paste it, fill in where you live and what you're good at, and it'll map out your whole local AI business with you.