The Lazy Way I Make Money With AI (2026)

[0:00]I've made over $26,000 selling digital products online and I work maybe 1 hour per week. The secret, of course, is using AI tools, but if you watch a lot of AI videos on YouTube, they talk about spinning up agents and connecting APIs. It doesn't need to be that complicated. I'm going to show you a simpler way. Now, I didn't start with a master plan or a 10-step strategy. I had been writing articles on medium for years, but not getting much traction. I wasn't making any money. So I literally opened up chat GPT one day and I said, how can I make money online? And that one conversation with chat BT is where it all started. I've experimented a lot with passive income and AI tools, but it always ended up costing me time and money. I wanted to make money, not spend money. And that's when something clicked for me. AI is supposed to make our lives easier, not harder and more complicated. If the system you're building feels overwhelming, you're on the wrong path. So I focus on one simple idea. Let AI do 80% of the grunt work and you do the 20% of work that only you can do. Because I want my effort to actually move things forward. So my first digital product, it took me about two to three hours to create. I used a template from Canva. I used Chat GPT to accelerate the process. Listed on Gumroad and got my first sale within a few hours. My first day, I had four sales, $20. It doesn't sound like much, but it showed me something. It showed me that it is possible to make money online without spending money on paid ads, without connecting APIs or fancy AI tools. And I know that doesn't sound like much, but it proved to me that, hey, this actually can work. Real people paying real money for something that just took me two or three hours to make. So from there it started compounding. The first few months I was making about $800 a month, and then it climbed to 1,000, and then 2,000, and now consistently I'm making over $3,000 a month. largely in passive income. The system I use compounds over time as you add more products and drive more traffic. My whole setup is ridiculously simple. I use AI to write articles, I use AI to make digital products and I sell it on Gumroad. That's the entire stack. No agents, no APIs, no Zapier. And I make $3,000 every month. So what should you actually sell? The best products are simple products, and the best products are made for specific people in a specific audience. My first product was about Suno AI and how to make music on Suno AI, and it was essentially just a list of prompts with a handful of tips and tricks on the program. That was the focus. If you have no idea what to create, I put together a list of 20 digital products that are selling in 2026 with real examples. I'll link that below, grab that and use it as inspiration, use it as a launch point for your first digital product. All right, so quick reality check. This is not about getting rich quick. It does take time. It does take effort. It took me three months to scale past $1,000, then six months to scale past $2,000, and now I'm growing and consistently over $3,000 a month. The longer you do it, the more successful you become. And most people quit right before it starts working. So this video is just the intro to the series. And the next videos, I'm going to share what platform I use to sell digital products, how to create your first digital product, how to drive traffic to that digital product, and the AI workflow I use and much more. So if you want real practical walkthroughs on this stuff, subscribe and I'll see you next week.