9 AI Skills You MUST Have to Become Rich in 2025

In the next 12 months, the top earners won't be programmers, marketers, or salespeople. They'll be the AI power users. So, I'm going to go through the nine AI skills with the highest income potential that you can master today, even if you're starting from zero.

And the last one being the absolute highest. This isn't just a chat GPT tutorial. It's the blueprint to AI domination.

Starting with skill number one, prompt engineering. with an income potential between 50 and 100 an hour. Communicating with AI systems has become as valuable as coding software in the internet was in the early 2000s.

People need folks that know how to do prompt engineering. Crafting the message, how to talk to the AI. See, if you don't know how to do that, garbage in is garbage out and you won't get results.

Asking the AI to say, "Create me a marketing plan," is not a great prompt. And yet, that is how most people use it every day. Okay.

So, I want to give you something that I never share, which is my exact structure for how all my companies have to do great prompting because if they don't learn how to talk to the AI, the AI won't give them the gold and I don't have time to waste. This has to be perfect. The first thing is you got to define the role.

When you're talking to an AI, you have to say act as a marketer, act as a designer or even today, I was reviewing some legal docs and the prompt my assistant put in that she shared with me said act as a lawyer. Because if you don't tell it how to process the information, then it can't give you the specifics through the lens that you need to get the best output. The second is provide the data.

If you want your AI chat to give you the best output, give it examples. The more information, the more examples of what works great, the better. When I'm trying to get my AI to help me with copy or financial analysis, I have to give it examples of what great data looks like.

Number three, make the ask. give very clear instructions for what you want and what you need. See, most people are very vague.

Tell it you want certain types of analysis. You wanted to do research. The more specific you are in your prompt, the better the response is going to be.

Number four is request the format. There's no way that I'm going to ask for a response without telling it how I want it crafted. If I want it bulleted, I want it short, I want it piffy, I want it summarized, I want it as a PDF, I want it as an image, maybe I want it as a spreadsheet.

Whatever the format you need it, you have to tell it. If you don't, it's just going to give you back text that's not going to give you the insight you're going to need from the AI. To make this easy, if you want my exact prompt PDF, like my actual blueprint and structure, just find me on Instagram, Dan Martell, two ls of Martell, and message me the word prompt, and I'll send you my entire prompt cheat sheet.

Which brings us to skill number two, AI assisted software development with income potential between 100 and 200 an hour. Most people don't realize this, but building custom software today can be built by non-technical people. I have a venture company called Martell Ventures where we incubate and launch AI first small business software.

And it's crazy that all the prototypes we built are built by normal people that are not programmers because there's existing AI coding tools that allow us to like talk to the software using tools like cursor, brelet, retool. They're all available, most of them for free. and it writes all the heavy lifting code for us.

So, we just got to come up with the crazy ideas we got. But getting it going, any person can literally build these apps. I'm going to teach you how to code software using AI.

Even as a nontechnical person, number one, create a course. I'm not joking. You want to use AI to teach you how to use the AI tools.

I know it sounds silly, but go into chat GPT and say, "I want you to tell me how to build this app using Replet as an example. " and have it be very detailed step by step and hit enter. Act as a program or act as an expert.

Follow my prompt structure and it will tell you exactly how to sign up for the software, configure it, what prompts to put in there to have it generate the code and then even tell you how to run it. Number two, find a problem. My favorite thing to do is to talk to consultants who are working with small business customers or CEOs or entrepreneurs or whoever you want to sell products to and ask them what are people asking you to solve over and over again and then find those people to co-create software with you.

They've got the problem, you've got the knowhow. You take those things, you put it together, you have a business and you get paid to build these prototypes. And if you build it once, you can sell it over and over and over again to the next person.

Number three, build the solution. See, most people get stuck in learning mode. I call it shelf help where they're like always pulling books off the shelf and they're like getting motivated and they're listening to podcasts and they're watching YouTube videos.

You want to go be a person that JFD eyes it just freaking does it and get to building stuff in the real world. Implement it, play with it, prototype it. The people that actually build solutions and get those deployed, they're the ones that are going to get paid the big bucks.

But often people say, "Well, what if I'm more of an artist? I'm more of a designer, creative. " Here's the good news.

AI doesn't have to threaten your career either. Which brings us to skill number three, AI design. With income potential between 100 and 200 an hour, isn't it wild how quick things have moved?

I remember when I used to get AI to create images for me back in the day, 6 months ago. If you look closely enough, the image had like six fingers or three eyeballs. And now with a lot of these generative image AI tools, it's almost photorealistic what you can get AI to do.

When it comes to design, design is no longer about your ability. It's about the creativity of your ideas. I want to teach you the skills that you're going to need to master AI design that my media team taught me to help them create projects five times faster.

Number one is generative photo. The key is is to learn how to master the prompts that you enter so that it can generate these photorealistic images. And the best way to do that is just ask AI to teach you.

I use it all the time. I used it last week to generate new hot sauce called bite back your tongue which is a fun project. Putting my logo all over the place.

Sometimes I get excited. I want to design new key designs for my supercar collection because hey, custom keys are cool. I'm not a designer.

Guess what? AI is. And it made it look freaking amazing.

Number two, you're going to make a ton of money. And that's learning how to do photo editing using AI. Think about all these people that have like old images or low resolution.

You can use Photoshop AI or even Topaz to do photo editing using AI natively in the tool. And it's not hard to learn. You can do this.

If I can figure this out, so can you. Number three, web design. Not only can you use AI to design the websites, you can use it to actually code the websites.

There's tools like Figma that has AI plugins. It'll actually cut it up and build it into the finished product. Or reloom.

io that just does it all for you. That's how you're going to make the big bucks. Where everybody else used to pay 15, $20,000 to build websites, you can do it for a fraction of that and keep the balance.

Which brings us to skill number four, AI video editing with income potential between 100 and 200 an hour. This one's fascinating for me as a media company because my team used to spend hundreds of hours cutting silence out of videos, fixing audio, cutting footage, getting me to come in and do new takes. And now with AI, it's literally instant.

The crazy part is video used to be 80% technical skill and 20% creative decisions. Now it's all about the creative decisions and the technical stuff is taken care of. It's kind of like having a sue chef in a kitchen do all the prep for you so that as the chef, you're just putting the plate together.

So, I want to teach you the three skills you have to master to be a worldclass AI video editor. The first one is clipping. Every person today needs a clipper.

They need somebody to look at all the content and clip out the good stuff that's used for all the different short form videos across all social platforms. It's the skill of removing silence from a video clip or creating clips for social using tools like Firecut or Opus. My 12-year-old son today gets paid to clip for other people playing video games on YouTube.

Number two is generative video. This is super cool because you can help somebody create an AI avatar. There's actually a company called Vidyard that will generate an AI avatar that looks just like you.

Even companies like Synthesia that came out with a new model that allows anybody to just upload example videos. It will generate a realistic video of you talking. I mean, I have a friend that's using this right now to grow his TikTok, and he's never recorded a video.

Somebody writes a script, they use the AI, they publish it, and those shorts go viral. Number three, B-roll search. This one's near and dear to my heart because we pride ourselves on finding real examples of me doing the things that I talk about.

And I will tell you, there are terabytes of video that my team has to go through to try to find. Now, the good news with AI search, we've been able to increase that speed so it can find it. But even if there's situations where somebody didn't actually do the thing, but you wanted to put them together with the scenario for the B-roll, you can actually use AI to generate that video, so you can clip it in and it looks realistic.

But when it comes to creativity, this next skill could absolutely expand your business. Which brings us skill number five, AI writing. With an income potential between 100 and 200 an hour, the most valuable business skill isn't writing words, it's communicating ideas.

So, for example, my writing team uses AI to take all the video transcripts from coaching calls, advisory calls, conversations, pretty much they record me all the time, and they use it to extract the stories, the lessons, the quotes that they'll then use in my newsletter and article. So, it's not having AI per se, write for me. It's using it to find the gold that they can insert into a video like this or prompt me for a real so they get the natural and real reaction, but using AI to do all the heavy lifting.

So, I sat down with my head of Word, Joel, and I asked him to teach me all the AI writing skills that people need to master to get paid the big bucks. Knowing how to use those is where you're going to make your money. Number one, extraction.

As I mentioned, take long form content, video, transcripts, and have it break it down into the essence or the ideas that are represented because then you can take that as module pieces and move them around for your newsletter or tweets on X or LinkedIn posts and make it your own, not have it just right for you and it sounds like a freaking robot. Number two, ideation. What you want to do is take all the best performing content for your client, feed that to AI, and have it push new ideas to you that you know are going to go viral because you've already have examples of it working on their existing content, but then you can come up with new ideas, new variations, tell it to like figure out 15 new ways based on what's worked in the past so that you know every idea is going to hit.

Number three, creation. And this is different than ideation because what you want to do is you want to feed it the exact tone of voice, specific examples of where your customer has written pieces of content that they're proud of that you know have gone viral and then you create a custom AI or custom GPT that writes just like they would write or just like they would talk. That way they'll pay you the top dollar so that they can use that AI across all departments from responding to emails and customer support to writing new marketing campaigns.

But learning AI won't just impact the simple skills. Which brings us to skill number six. AI content marketing with an income potential between 200 and 300 an hour.

I'm about to tell you something. Once you hear, you can't unhear it. And it's just as bad as finding out that Santa Claus isn't real.

Have you ever heard of Arnold's Pump Club? Okay, it is the top podcast by Arnold Schwarzenegger and it's his newsletter and an app and it is massive. It's a huge business.

What's crazy is he's never recorded a podcast. He has an agency that manages the whole thing for him from start to finish using AI systems, creating newsletter content, voice clones, and publishes the whole thing automatically. So, here's how you can get paid top dollar to build an AI content creation engine just like them.

Number one, define the outcome. What does a complete product look like? Is it just a podcast with 100 episodes?

Is it a newsletter? Is it some other kind of premium content like an app? You got to figure out the whole strategy.

But the cool part is you use AI to help you. Number two, create the content. Use all the skills.

You kind of stack them together that I just taught you to generate all the different content strategies you're going to need to get paid to produce this thing. Number three, repurpose content. You take that oneh hour podcast and you have AI pull the clips to publish it all over the freaking place.

Your customer becomes this omniresent person in their industry where everybody sees them all over the place and they're giving you all the credit and referring you to many other people helping you get paid to do the same thing for them. Which brings us to skill number seven, no code AI automation with income potential between 300 and 400 an hour. If you look at all the wastes of time, money, resources that businesses go through just managing workflow, you would find so many opportunities to help businesses make money.

And it's why people are paid so well. Recently, we had our automation expert take all of our onboarding that we use at Martell Media for new employees from 15 tasks down to one. Imagine what that saved us.

That's why we're willing to invest in the right talent to build these kind of automations. It actually brings me back to a quote that this guy Naval Ravocant talks about who's like one of the top technology investors and then also like life philosophers and he says, "We don't get paid for hours anymore. We get paid for outputs and automation can literally 10x your output.

" To make this super easy for you, I'm going to share with you my noode AI automation blueprint to help you understand how to use tools like make. com, N8N, Zapier, Gum Loop, and many of these AI workflows to be able to get paid top dollar to implement this work. Number one, map the workflow.

So for you to be able to come in and map out all the processes to find the bottleneck that's stopping the business from growing, that is what's valuable. So, for example, in a sales process, you've got everything from the sales development rep who qualifies leads to the account exec who enrolls leads to the sales manager who manages the whole sales infrastructure. Going to a whiteboard and mapping that workflow on its own is worth a ton of money.

Number two, you got to focus on cash. This is where everybody gets it wrong where they come in and they start automating things cuz it's easy, but it doesn't save or make them any money. You got to find the lowhanging fruit that you can make money for your clients because the more they save or make using your automations, the more they're going to spend with you to do more of it.

So, for example, helping a business do cold outreach at scale, meaning that there is a AI bot talking, dialing every minute, every day, like a 24-hour salesperson. That will generate more income for the business, which is going to get you paid more. Number three is build co-pilots.

This is where you look at somebody's work and you ask yourself, "How can I build like an AI buddy that sits right next to them or in their workflow and helps them with the work they're doing, so they're only reviewing the final outputs, not having to do a lot of manual tasks? All that's cool, but what about using AI for more complex problems in a workflow? " Which brings us to skill number eight, AI data analysis.

With income potential between 300 and 400 an hour, I don't know if you knew this, but Amazon runs on data. every decision product tweak test is databacked. With AI, every business is going to have to start leveraging like big data analysis or it's probably going to suffer and fail.

Just like Edward Demings, my personal man crush always says, without data, you're just another person with an opinion. So, here's how you can get paid to do AI data analysis. Number one, data cleanup.

Most businesses have the messiest data. The reason why they're not winning and growing is because they can't make a good decision because they don't have the insights. They have spreadsheets all over the place.

They have disconnected systems. You can get paid to use AI to create a data warehouse or a data lake so that they can make better decisions because it's easier to find the information. Number two, data enrichment.

Most businesses have no clue that you can even do this. And that's why they're going to love you. when you come in and say, "Hey, all those leads that you just have emails for, I can go to these other systems like full story or 6 cents and append the data or enrich the data with contact numbers and credit scores and location and you can do that using AI and get paid to do it.

Number three is data insight extraction. You get paid to help people understand the information. One of the companies I'm involved in is called Lomi and they're a smart food composter that takes literally plastic and turns it into dirt.

What they did to improve their Facebook ads is gave AI all the information on customers who bought and say, "Where are more customers like this? " Well, it turns out there are certain states where they charge people to take their garbage away. And those people bought at a higher level than people that didn't have to pay to have their garbage removed.

And those ads started performing better because AI told them where to find more customers just like them. Pulling out the insights, the recommendations, monitoring things. AI is now set up so you can take data and get insights in a click.

This is the last and highest paid income skill. Number nine, no code AI agent development with income potential between 400 and 500 an hour. So last week I got asked, Dan, is AI going to take my job?

And I used to say, well AI is not going to take your job, but somebody using AI is going to take your job. Now here's where I'm at. Is if you don't replace yourself using AI agents, then you will be replaced.

You got to be the person that actually builds them. These agents will work 24 hours a day. They don't complain.

They don't take vacation and they do the job 100% the same way every time they do it. That's why agents are so powerful. So what I want to teach you is how to build AI agents so you can essentially replace employees within these companies and get paid to do it.

The first step is you have to define the job. Every agent has a specialized output that it needs to learn how to do. And your job is to map it out with your customers.

So you can take all aspects of what it does and make sure it does it really well. I mean, if you look at sales, for example, having an AI agent qualify prospects is the lowest hanging fruit and can get rid of one to two to three full-time people and do it better 24/7 with no complaints. The second step is you got to develop the model.

This is where you actually train it using existing data that you have with your customer that shows examples of how it's done, right? So if you have a process and standard operating procedure, you have examples of phone calls or transcripts from those calls or even chat logs where you can give it examples of salespeople qualifying and doing it right. You need to develop the model with that training data set.

And the third step is to deploy and monitor. If you don't build a system that looks at the output and measures the quality of it and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down, then you're not training the AI to get better and better over time. It's why most systems do have humans involved at first so they can get smarter and smarter and essentially do the work even faster.

For example, our sales team has this AI powered sales chat tool that essentially takes all feedback from positive chats where the person bought negative chats where it didn't get qualified fast enough or the deal didn't happen and then uses that to feed the algorithm so they can get smarter about recommending new sales reps what to say, how to say it, when to say it all automatically. Here's what I've realized is that all this information can feel overwhelming and some of you guys may not feel like you're smart enough or good enough to do anything with it. It might be interesting, but here's what I know.

If you made it all the way to the end, I want you to know you're here for a reason. I think AI is in your future. I think that you should go get paid top dollars to teach people AI.

I think you should get paid to implement AI into the businesses that need it. There's never been a bigger demand right now in the world, and you now have a roadmap for how to do it. Don't sleep on this.

Don't delay. Hey, don't drag your feet. The time is now.

You were meant for greatness and you watched this for a reason.