5 Ways to Start an AI Agency in 2025

if you're looking to use the AI space to build businesses to make money and to change your life generally then this video is probably the most important one you're going to watch this year um because in this video I'm breaking down five different ways that you can start an AI business using the same formula that I've used to change my life with it so if you're not familiar with me on my channel my name is Lee Motley and about a year and a half ago I got into the AI space sensing that there was a

big opportunity brewing and I've been able to over the past 18 months go from literally Zer in AI income to multiple six figures per month with me and my team so we've been a to come in and learn this AI space rapidly exactly how I'm going to share with you later in this video how to actually learn the stuff you need to build businesses in the AI space going to be teaching that and giving you a crash course and a step-by-step list on how to learn the stuff you required for five different AI business models

which I share at the end so very important video if you are serious about it then watch this thing because this is the distillation of a year and a half of my learnings in the space and also the most recent styles of AI agencies which is the model you're going to be learning that are actually working and and people are actually able to to make money with so going to start off with a little bit of more background so I'm going to rub this off give me a second a little bit more background to actually

making money with AI in general and how how you're able to do it so people might think you need a an AI SAS right you're probably thinking oh I need to have like a really bright idea and I need to go and raise a bunch of money and make make this big thing out of it uh no we don't really want to do that cuz that's not accessible to most of us I mean I didn't have like a million dollars just sitting in the in in the in the safe to to go and throw it

at one of these startups or it didn't have VC connections to go and get money so SAS is kind of off the board immediately unless you do the kind of no code SAS rout Etc but generally if you're looking to just get started on online business specifically um it's going to be something closer to agency and an agency is when you're going to have clients who come and you pitch them and say hey look I can build that's a that's going to be a hammer I can build this for you and then they give you

money back for it right so you don't need any upfront cost well there's some upfront cost for software Etc but it's nothing like a SAS we need potentially millions of dollars of funding to get it to get it off the ground properly but agency business model which I'm sure you're familiar with smma and all the all the other agency business models U there's a million of them you're giving something to your client and they're paying you return so it's just client and and Patron to some degree uh relationship so beyond that you also have in

the AI space but this is based on top of the need for AI Solutions so all of these business models need to be based on some kind of demand in the AI space and where money can actually be exchanged so agency opportunity in the AI space is based on the fact that we have millions and millions of businesses and companies around the world who have money and they need and they're willing to invest in getting AI solutions for their business so they can out compete the competitors and actually benefit from some of the Technologies this

is what the whole AI agency model that I've been talking about for over over a year now is about is this AI Solutions demand which is is really rapidly growing um throughout the world so secondly aside from agency you also have education now this is a massive need in the AI space right now as well and if you're able to combine agency and education where it's educating your Niche there is so much money to be made collectively from this as well so what I'm going to teach you is first of all you can't educate anyone

unless you've actually done the thing so I'm going to teach you how to start an agency and get off the ground and learn the stuff that will then allow you to also educate people uh but the agency is really where you're going to have to start cuz if you're a LinkedIn AI Guru who's all all they've ever done is done Consulting no one's you're never going to be able to get paid a lot for that information because you simply don't know your so uh when it comes to starting an AI business we don't really want

to go the Sass rout we can't jump to consulting or education immediately because we don't really know anything we haven't got any tangible proof of how we've been able to help businesses with AI and create value so education you can't go to immediately but generally this is built on Need for clarity clity SL strategy businesses and people all over the world are needing Clarity and strategy on the AI space and everything that's happening in it so education is still a massive opportunity for you but it has to come down the line you have to actually

learn the thing and do the thing first or you're never going to be much of an educator this could be in the real estate Niche could be any Niche you can cut it there's a need for Education whether you're doing like Enterprise Consulting on how to adapt AI to their Dev teams like there's so much there but you first must start off with an agency which is what I'm going to be talking about for the rest of this video okay so we're not going s we're not doing education you got to start off with an

agency and now you get the three problems of starting an AI agency which I've painfully learned uh through myself and through all all the people in our our broader Community there's three problems that you have to solve when starting one of these agencies and this is what it's exactly what my uh the five different strategies I'm going to give you at the end of this video are going to be based around so five different types of AI agencies that occupy different types of niches and I'm going to give you the blueprint to start them but

you first need to understand that we have three problems when starting an AI agency firstly you have expertise technical so somewhere in your agency or your brain needs to be some kind of AI expertise understanding how to build things how to use different software and different tools or even code yourself to build systems that create value with AI so you have to have some kind of technical expertise and that's what we're going to be the step-by-step strategies that I'm giving you after this that's what they really focus on on building up within a a two

to three month period so first thing you need expertise uh technical expertise either within your brain as the agency owner when you're starting out or you need to hire it and bring it in as a as a CTO a lead developer or just as developers in general secondly you need lead flow so you need some way to generate leads and have them coming across your desk and reaching out to you to ask to work with you um or replying to your emails or however you're generating leads and then finally you need credibility SL Authority cuz

businesses are skeptical about AI right now and if you can't provide some kind of reason as to why you you're the guy for the job and you can actually deliver what you say uh they're not going to buy from you so uh you need to figure out a way to either tackle these problems one by one or to tackle them all at once which is the strategy that I recommend and that I'm going to give you now so we need to somehow get technical expertise either in our brain or we need to hire it we

need to find some way of generating leads and bringing people to to in contact with our business and our services and then we need the credibility and authority to close them like why I can actually do what I say I'm going to do why I know this is going to help your business and it's not just some AI hype crap that is actually just going to waste your time and money so we need to achieve all these three remember that okay now the strategy to solve this for most of you so remember we need to

solve all three of those problems as quickly and efficiently as possible and with the least amount of pain um there's always going to be pain but we're going to try to do it with as little as possible this is from my own experience and also from hundreds of people now in the community broader Community um in the AI agency space both from free and paid Community who are using something similar to this and we're able to see success with it so strategy revolves around one learn the thing and the thing is the area or specific

type of narrow expertise that you want to build within your agency first so we've got I don't know how I'm going to draw this but uh you can have broad broad expertise where you have to know A to Z everything about a subject and everything in between or you can just say I'm just going to learn this little bit and expert at that a lot easier initially it's going to take a lot less time for for in terms of my AI expertise over the past 18 months I have started initially Niche and and an expert

in a small area which was originally custom knowledge chatbots if you guys remember that um way back in March last year I was making all these videos about how I can build these custom knowledge chat Bots and giving you coding tutorials and all these business owners oh yeah can you build one of these for me so I started off Niche and then through running my agent and making more videos and getting on calls with Consulting calls with people I then slowly broadened my expertise to the point where now when it comes to AI solutions for

businesses and and how AI can help them it's a it's a very broad understanding of it so you can't expect to start off broad need to start narrow which is why I mean when we say learn the thing when you see the five different Niche agency strategies that you're going to get next it's all about picking one area so whether you're starting here and going okay I'm going to start there or I'm going here and I'm going to to start here we need to start somewhere Niche and narrow and we're going to learn the thing

so that's step one and simultaneously you want to share your journey so as you're learning the thing you want to be documenting the learning of the thing so I did this exact same thing over a year ago now when I started my channel I came into the space really curious really motivated but I didn't have that I mean the lln technology that like chat gbt is based on had only really just come out and so I was starting at the starting blocks with basically everyone else and I was only able to get to this point

because of just rapid iteration and and a lot of output within the space and you can do the exact same thing but you need to be sharing the learning of this so that builds up so I'm getting a little bit hit of myself but if we share the journey in step three we're then going to offer sorry this will make sense in a second so sharing your journey can mean YouTube can mean LinkedIn can I mean any kind of medium we've talked about a lot of these things on the channel uh but sharing the journey

in some way is going to be building up a track record of your expertise and growth and that's going to tie into uh I should probably have the three things expertise um two lead flow and three so this is the strategy to solve these three Problems by the way you probably can't see the green very well but you know what it says expertise lead flow and Authority credibility so by learning the thing you can then share your journey of learning the thing on these different platforms and then when you offer free Consulting course the interest

that you generate by sharing a journey is going to allow you to convert some of that interest into actual uh buying attention people are ready to start paying for you paying for your services potentially so um then you can go uh close right once You' got people on the phone you'll find that purely if you do enough of them there's going to be people who have money and are willing to pay for it and they'll say hey look would you be able to build me this I'm willing to pay you for it and that's when

you can start to monetize on all of this stuff here so coming back to the three problems the expertise comes from learning the thing the lead flow comes from sharing your journey and also the expertise to something you know you showing that you know what you're talking about is going to create that lead flow as well but it's the documenting it on YouTube or LinkedIn exactly how done exactly how hundreds of other people are doing it now and the authority also comes from sharing your journey so when they look back and you are 3 months

down the line and you've been consistently posting information about uh one of these Niche areas which we're going to go into later whether it's it's text based agents whether it's voice based agents these different areas where you can be an expert within a short space of time in the AI space you can be an expert in literally a month if you pick one specific tool so it's very easy to become an an expert you just need to actually put in the effort and and apply yourself for a long period of time um once you've got

all of these done you've got the expertise ticked off the lead pH tick off and the authority then you're able to start to close deals so this is a way of attacking all three of these problems in one go so within the space of 3 months you will learn the thing share the journey be be likely if you follow the strategy correctly be getting people booking and free Consulting calls with you and that sets you up perfectly to be able to start closing deals solving all three of these problems now there is another way of

doing it which we've kind of done as a community collectively over the past year and that's to learn the thing not to share the journey at all but get to 6 months down the line here we are 6 months after starting and you've learned the thing but now you've done absolutely nothing to share the thing and so you're at Square One when it comes to marketing yourself and getting some lead flow which is problem number two so I would highly recommend you do these all simultaneously so that you can shortcut this thing to about months

and you have the attention you need to start closing some kind of deals okay so now we're going to get into the actual five different strategies for starting and so what these are is a a type of AI agency you can start so that you can have a vehicle to learn and get deeper into the AI space it's really all this stuff is about is making a bet on the AI space generally and just picking the right vehicle or horse within the space so that you can learn faster than everyone else cuz it's simply a

level of expertise Qui question who is the smartest and who is the most experienced in a certain space within the AI space might be the real estate AI guy the only way that you're going to become the number one expert is by actually doing some kind of business and being active in the space and the AI agency as a vehicle is what personally what I've used to get deeper into the space and learn and for many of you it's also going to be the best starting point um before you go onto reeducation or whatever you

want to do later but whether you go into SAS as well I've got my own AI SAS too but the AI agency is what set me up for creating the SAS so it all kind of stems from the agency at least in my experience so have these five different types and you might be a bit confused but give me a second uh five types strategies you get the idea so number one AI Auto Specialist so we have an AI automation specialist um let me write all of these out here first for you so then we

have two text based agent I'm not they're all Specialists I'm not going to write it every time um three voice agent specialist four is zapia ecosystem specialist and I've run into space here number five is chat B specialist so these are five different Niche types of remember that little diagram I did that you got the broad and then you've got the niched now this isn't this is niching your agency down by solution type and you can always go broader at any point but the idea is that it's easy to become an expert in in a

narrow area within a short space of time and therefore be able to charge expert rates um than trying to be Broad and taking a lot longer to be kind of a a midlevel intelligence or or understanding of the whole field so it's better to go deep initially and then over time you can broaden out to different areas so these are basically starting blocks that I want to give you and just spoon feed you I know the hardest thing when you're starting these businesses I I started my e-commerce stores like four or five years ago and

when I was getting started it was purely the analysis paralysis of having so many options and concerns about the sequence in which I should do them I'm trying to just spoon feed this to you all here's five different ways and I'm going to give you stepbystep instructions so that you don't have to use your brain for the next 2 3 months learn the stuff follow the process of sharing a journey as well and 90 995 90 ideally 100% of you are able to actually put some uh put some rubber to the road and progress in

the space by using at least one of these so going through these an AI automation specialist is different from a general AI agency because they're going to be specializing in specifically AI automations on things like make.com and air table so this is primarily based around um make.com and Air table so these are the only tools you really need to learn to become an AI automation specialist um and I've got some examples of guys who are successfully running these agencies as well so example one is uh sh I'll put him up on screen sh Matthews great

guy he was out in Dubai with me recently for our recent AI agency Mastermind um sh is running a specifically AI automation focused agency um we also have SJ member of my accelerator who's recently I had him recently on the channel so I'll put that up here somewhere as well if you want to learn more about his story but he's come in as a complete non-developer decided to learn make.com and is now making a supplementary income to his main job which is equaling in some months is paying more than his actual job so U SJ

and Char two examples of AI automation Specialists and at the end of this video I'm going to let you know how you can actually get the step by step so I've got about six to 10 steps in each of these strategies that is available on a document that I'm going to give you at the end so if you want to get that I'll be letting you know where to get it at the end but I don't want to give that away too early right so each of these has attached to it like a 10-step plan

so if you're interested in any of these at any point then make sure you stick around for for that check space agents we have um these are a little more complicated but the gpts if you played around with open AI chat GPT the gpts uh feature that they released that's a consumer facing Tech bace agents uh framework and and platform you also have the assistance API um so this is how you can build gpts and and use them programmatically across anywhere in the world for to build into applications for your clients so text based agents

are different from chat Bots and that they are basically you're building custom chat GPT like experiences for your clients and that's free form that's open-ended that's conversational um you might be using tools you might be using custom knowledge these are like custom versions of chat GPT is the easiest way to think of these um I've actually got my software agentive on top of this which allows you to make gpts and put them on WhatsApp put them on websites Etc so I'm very big and also my agency morning side is very big in the check space

agent space um this is something that I'm I'm really big on I think this is a great place to start um but you guys can make your choice at the end when you get the you get the step by step so text based agents You're Building custom chat gbt applications for your clients and putting them on WhatsApp putting them on websites various places and uh your buddy's software also helps you do that so voice space agents I'm sure you've heard I've talked about a lot on the channel I think the voice AI Space is really

just getting started and all of the other guys that are in my accelerator and and my close Network they're all making a a sh ton of money right now selling these voice AI Solutions um so the SP space is extremely hot it's moving very quickly if you wanted to jump in and become an expert I've seen guys go in and be an expert within space of like one to two months have really applied effort in this and if you get in the right circles I mean all of my friends that are selling these Solutions are

just freely sharing like this is what's working this is what people are selling um this is what people want to buy so this is a really good uh really good space to be in you've got platforms like um Bland AI shout out the guys at Bland uh we've got um what is it AI there's a there's a new one of these every week so don't uh forgive me if I forget one um synth flow syn flow there's a whole bunch of different platforms right there's a vapy HS different platforms you can learn you can basically

just pick one decide to be good at it and step-by-step strategy that I I'll give to you has a ton of excellent resources that are all on YouTube all of the resources that I'm providing and the step-by-step guides are going to be free um voice space agent space going to be huge really popping off right now um great place to be in in my opinion and you have the the zapia ecosystem we have some examples actually of these guys so we have sh and SJ we're doing AI automation um agency specifically focused on the AI

automation space u then we have myself morning side my agency is primarily focused on this through our own software um so we focus on Tech Bas agents primarily also have Isaiah member of my accelerator original member of my community um and he's selling Tex based agents AI appointment sets for Instagram DMS I've recently done an interview with him on the channel if you want to learn more about how he I think he's making $25,000 a month now on that and that's soon to be more if you want to watch that there'll be tag somewhere up

there isaah is doing very well myself and the team selling agents to agent of doing very well as well voice base agents we have guys like uh Mark and Taha I've had mark on the channel um a long time ago but I'll actually link their channels down below if you want to check them out and they're going to be linked all through these documents as well so scrap the description they're going to be all through these documents but examples of people who are as successfully running these types of agencies are going to be in the

document as well so maraha jannis I'll pop them up screen you guys might know jannis by now um good friend of mine and he's really crushing it in the space using voice agents then the zappy ecosystem is an interesting play because the zapia ecosystem has got so much to it now there's tables there's uh there's zaps in general there's canvases there's chatbots there's so much crammed into the zappy ecosystem and it's all no code as well so if you're looking to just get started in the space and really get eased into Ai and Automation and

and building these agencies the zappy ecosystem is a good way to just block out all the and all the noise and just say this place which is very well documented huge Community great support I'm going to just focus on this area so if you're if you're really concerned about the technical nature of building some of these Solutions voice agents can get a little bit ner on the code if you're doing things like vapy Tech Spas agents uh when you're doing customer Integrations of different platforms can get a little bit Gilly um and doing custom front-end

interfaces AI automation not usually too bad um this is probably a good place to start as well if you're a bit concerned about that but the zappi e system generally being a like fundamentally no code platform is a great place to get started so you can build um on here automations chat Bots you're can to have like data management so you can integrate AI into all of these and be creating value with AI through the through the zapia platform so good place to look into if you're concerned about the the the development or the coding

nature of a lot of these Solutions I I personally if I was starting off brand new i' would be seriously looking at the zappia ecosystem because they're building a lot of cool stuff as well so it's good it's a good long-term bit and zappia's also got zapia Central which I've talked about on the channel uh s talked about on the channel recently and it's their AI hub for creating AI agents through zapia and again all no code so it's like this but easier so zappier is a very good thing to to be looking into if

you are concerned about the the uh development side of things should probably jump over this way finally chatbot specialist so this is different to textbase agents um I'm going to make a video on the difference between chatbots and agents um soon because I probably should just make that clear um but Cliff Notes text based agents are these CH chat gbt style experiences that are open-ended you can ask them endless questions they might have knowledge pulled in they might have tools pulled in but it's it's fundamentally an open-ended and conversational interaction chatbot building is more so

focused on uh things like voice flow and I've talked about voice flow for over a year now and that's my goto chatbot building platform and I differentiate these from Tech Bas agents and that chatbots I need to program and design uh piece by piece and I have to build all the logic if I don't build the logic it's not going to be there so it needs to be like okay well if this comes in and we do something here okay well it's either going to go up here or it's going to go down here where

you've got much more of a structured layout and control over the flow and functionality so if you don't build it it's not going to be in there but with textbase agents you don't need to program there's no programming like this you program it at the prompt level so when you write your little prompt for the agent that's the programming of the textbase agent here you actually need to program it by telling it what to do when XYZ happens right so these are a little bit different they're not worse they are in some cases you want

more control over the solution that you're building and and the functionality within it sometimes these are a little bit too wild and and unhinge to to get the functionality that your client wants um and also these can include buttons and things like this and buttons make it it easier and better to use for your customers in various circumstances so chatbot specialist still a very valid one to to be looking into um I thank the The Voice flow to Whatsapp because you can put a WhatsApp app with all these buttons and it can do things the

the automation of all the all of key businesses processes with WhatsApp via voice flow I think is is a great stack to get started you can look at any any business you can basically walk into and go say hi do you can try to take the core functions of that whether it's booking a table reserving meeting the meeting a designer or or meeting the team Etc can all be put into some kind of voice flow chat bot that you can be then be put on WhatsApp I mean Americans you're a bit behind on the WhatsApp

buzz but the rest of the world is is very very uh eager to to be adopting things like this so for chatbot specialist a great example of this is big man brandan I'll put his channel you might seen him Brendon J Australian guy smashing in the space doing some really great tutorials so if you want to check out his channel that'll be linked on the uh on the document for this particularly um but those are the five different types and again these are narrow entry points to the space as a whole so you might decide

I'm going to master this and this and get really good at it and that's going to be my entry point and I'm going to make those the first solutions that I sell and over time you can broaden and take on different challenges but you need to start somewhere and the reason a lot of you aren't starting is because you don't have a clear you aren't able to to cross off the Alternatives you're looking at oh voice stuff oh Tex St oh I need to also do make an make an air table I'm trying to give

you a focused road map for two to three months so that you can actually get a start in the space and be able to cross some of these Alternatives off so in order to get the step-by-step guides for each of these it's between 6 to 10 steps and resources so it might be free online courses it might be V videos that I've made my my friends have made some of these guys here it's going to walk you through even free resources from places like make that has the uh that have their ownmy and things like

this so I've curated over the space of uh like a couple of days the best resources for learning each of these and put them into a sequence for you so all of this is going to be available CU I I can't really like throw it all at you in the description I'm going to make a post on my school so I've got a free school Community if you're interested in building AI businesses then my my school Community is kind of the place to be um I'm in there doing free q&as once a week and the

rest of the community are all actively building their own AI agencies consultancies uh sasses all of the the good stuff that you want to be around if you're serious about using this this opportunity so that's really all it is and I'm going to be talking about this a lot more uh on my channel but how I've been able to do some pretty cool stuff with my life since I I got into the space it's lit been 18 months and I've I've built quite possibly the the dream life that i' I've always wanted I have all

of my friends here in Cape Town at the moment we're all working together my whole thing was always just cool with cool people and I've been able to achieve that and the more people that I can get to use this opportunity to achieve that for themselves is uh is the ideal outcome for for me and if I can make videos with this and wave my hands around and make that happen in other people's lives and that's something I'm pretty proud of and more than happy to spend an hour W waving my hands around in front

of whiteboard for and of course this massive incentives for myself as well if I'm able to educate you guys appropriately and get you successful I also have software and if you use my software to build your agencies then I can make a lot of money as well so the whole point is that I introduce you to the stuff at some point you might end up using my software and that'll help you to make more money and then we all win right so that's the that's the agreement we have on this channel but if you want

to get access to all of this it is on the school free to Jo Jo it'll be in the description and if you go to the YouTube resources um it's a little tab on school once you get in it should you should get let in within 10 15 minutes or so there'll be a little tab called YouTube resources and you click on that you find the title of this video there'll be a whole post and in there I would have link to all of the resources for all these different strategies so no excuse now you

got to get started um that's that's it's real it's it's real I'm living proof of it and there are so many other people in the community I've interviewed ton of them on my channel now if you want to use this AI thing for your benefit and to actually not miss like it sounds so cringe and cliche but not to miss this one again like we get these once every 5 10 years right ually 10 and this is the one so use it that's all