Corey Ganim (AI Operator Academy) walks through nine AI business models seen all over the internet and ranks them by whether they actually make money, from S tier to F tier. 22 minutes. His main selling point: which offers are easy to sell, beginner-friendly, and productizable versus commoditized races to the bottom.

S tier

  • AI assessments — his favorite offer and biggest seller. A business owner pays ~$1,000; you sit down 45 minutes and map their manual work, pain points, and past automation failures; deliverable is a report of where AI fits
    • Why it’s S tier: least experience required of anything on the list (anyone can sell it), and it’s the perfect foot-in-the-door — easy to upsell higher-ticket work after, and you can credit the $1,000 toward the next offer, making it a no-brainer
    • Open-sourced the delivery template at audittemplate.ai
  • AI concierge — his current model, ~$1,200/hour effective. Not raw hourly consulting: done-with-you. Client pays ~$2,000/month for two 45-minute Zoom calls where THEY share their screen and you teach them where to click, what to prompt, how to turn processes into Claude skills
    • Why clients stay: forced accountability — paying means they actually do the AI implementation. “You could fire me today; the reason you don’t is you’d never get around to it.” He’s had clients 4-6+ months
    • “No other business model on planet Earth where you can make over $1,000 an hour without a college degree and ~30 days of training”

A tier

  • AI lead-gen systems — cold outbound powered by AI (cold email agency, LinkedIn ghostwriting agency). Directly tied to revenue, so the value is obvious to the client. Cold email has real infrastructure requirements (deliverability), which makes setup a paid service
    • Beginner-friendly path: small one-time setup fee + pay-for-performance (e.g. 10% of average deal size per lead) until you have case studies
    • Very productizable once you’re good at standing up the systems
  • Managed agents — build an AI agent that acts as an employee doing one specific task repeatedly. Example: Nick Vasilescu’s claims-processing agent for an insurance agency — a job that cost $60-80K/year in human salary, sold at ~$5K/month
    • Not beginner-friendly (needs sales + technical chops, not necessarily developer-level)
    • B2B resell angle: the client can resell the agent to peers (insurance-agency buddies), and you get a cut — very scalable with deep industry expertise. If you know an industry, you’re positioned to build and sell its agent

B tier

  • AI workshops — two tiers: public half-day workshops (~$500/head via Eventbrite + LinkedIn outreach; one host got 17 people) and corporate workshops for specific teams at $15-25K for a half-day or 1-2 days
    • Corporate workshops surface additional needs → upsell to custom-built systems (the host had two six-figure proposals out, solo operator, pure profit)
    • Downside: in-person, needs real expertise — not a starter offer
  • Knowledge-base builds — consolidate a company’s scattered data (Drive, Dropbox, Gmail, Slack, CRM, PM tools) into one central repository with an AI agent on top you can ask questions about their own data (biggest missed sales, fulfillment bottlenecks)
    • More technical than the rest (data security, storage, access), but very productizable and sticky — clients won’t leave once they see it
    • Upsell machine: $2K knowledge-base assessments → $5-25K+ builds → the KB itself can tell you what to build next for the client

C tier

  • AI voice agents — real need (70% of local service businesses let calls go to voicemail — HVAC, plumbers, locksmiths), but ~70% of deployed agents are terrible (cutting you off, no human handoff), and building them well is much harder than the hype suggests (edge cases, saying the wrong thing)
    • Currently commoditized and most trades aren’t ready to hear the pitch — likely a much better offer in 1-2 years as the tech improves

D tier

  • Hourly consulting — just selling an hour of time; capped around $200-300/hour, commoditized, and capped by your available hours. The same skills packaged as concierge are worth 4-5x

F tier

  • AI automation agency — everyone and their mother is starting one in 2026. Commoditized, no specialization, no niche, no specific product — stuck doing custom work forever, can’t productize, can’t hire (every project differs), can’t command premium prices. Worst positioning on the list

The summary tier list

  • S: AI assessments, AI concierge
  • A: AI lead-gen systems, managed agents
  • B: AI workshops, knowledge-base builds
  • C: AI voice agents
  • D: hourly consulting
  • F: AI automation agency

His play for a beginner: sell AI assessments as the foot in the door, then upsell to AI concierge — that’s the funnel behind his paid community (AI Operator Academy). Full assessment report template free at audittemplate.ai.

“No other business model on planet Earth where you can make over $1,000 an hour without a college degree and with about 30 days of training.” — Corey Ganim

“When they’re paying me $2,000 a month, it’s forced accountability. If they weren’t paying me, they would never get around to doing it.” — Corey Ganim, on why concierge clients stay