AI Side Hustles Mostly accurate, with one big caveat

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-07-24 · 7 min read

Alex Hormozi says AI won’t make you rich in 2026 — and the data mostly backs him

Verdict: Mostly accurate, with one big caveat. The core claim — that AI alone rarely makes people money — is well supported, but the video buries who actually wins and it ends with a sales pitch.

Alex Hormozi’s “Why AI won’t make you rich in 2026” has pulled in more than 230,000 views by arguing the opposite of nearly every other video in this genre. His pitch is a counter-pitch: AI increases leverage, sure, but it doesn’t erase the other things that make money, and most people bolting AI onto their business aren’t earning a cent more for it. Is he right? Largely, yes — and the research is on his side more than his critics would like to admit.

What the video actually claims

Hormozi’s central argument is about leverage — his word for the gap between what you put in and what you get out. AI is high leverage, he says, but so are capital, media, and teams, and those didn’t vanish when ChatGPT showed up. His evidence is anecdotal but pointed. His own company hit “another step increase in revenue,” and he insists it wasn’t because of AI: “If AI didn’t exist, we still would have had the increase.”

Then comes the part that stuck with viewers. He says he asked his wealthiest, oldest friends how much they personally use AI day to day, and most admitted they barely touch it — their teams use it, but they don’t. His read: businesses are “AI-maxing,” watching their token bills climb, and using that extra capacity to do lower-priority work faster. More output, same profit.

The highest-leverage skill, he argues, isn’t AI at all. It’s making good decisions about where to point your limited resources. He calls AI “just a tool, not the answer,” compares much of its current usefulness to having “a lot of virtual assistants,” and closes by asking you to click through to his free scaling roadmap. That last part matters, and we’ll come back to it.

Does the data support him?

Mostly, it does. The strongest evidence arrived a month before this video. A July 2025 report from MIT’s NANDA initiative, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business, found that 95% of companies were seeing no measurable return on their generative-AI investment, despite an estimated $30–40 billion poured into it. As CNBC reported, only about 5% of pilots produced real revenue acceleration. The researchers blamed a “learning gap” in how organizations integrate the tools — not the models themselves. That is Hormozi’s argument almost verbatim, backed by 150 leader interviews and 300 documented deployments.

The macro numbers agree. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated that generative AI represented roughly a 1.1% increase in U.S. productivity by late 2024 — real, but modest, not the economy-remaking surge the hype implied. Even the famous upside study, the one Bloomberg covered showing customer-service reps became 14% more productive with an AI assistant, found the gains landed unevenly — big for novices, near zero for the already-skilled. AI narrowed a skill gap; it didn’t mint money out of thin air.

And adoption itself is thinner than the noise suggests. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey put AI use in actual production of goods and services at just 8.8% of small businesses as of August 2025. Plenty of people are experimenting; far fewer have wired it into anything that changes the P&L.

So when Hormozi says his friends’ token bills are rising while their profits aren’t tied to AI, he’s describing a pattern the data already named.

The caveat the video skips

Here’s what he glosses over. AI isn’t failing to make money for everyone — it’s failing to make money for the average adopter, which is a different statement.

The same MIT report that found 95% getting nothing also found the winners, and they weren’t Hormozi-style established operators. They were young, focused startups that picked one painful problem, built tightly around a model, and grew from zero to $20 million in a year. Hormozi’s own examples quietly confirm this: he admits AI creative helped his advertising, and that his AI sales rep “has been helpful” and scales. Those aren’t small concessions. For a solo operator without his ten prior businesses and existing sales infrastructure, “more ad creative that converts” can be the whole game.

The other thing worth naming: this video is a lead magnet. It ends with a pitch for his free scaling roadmap — a funnel that works precisely because it positions him as the sober adult in a room full of AI hype merchants. That doesn’t make him wrong. But “AI won’t make you rich, here’s my framework that will” is still a business-opportunity message, and it deserves the same skepticism you’d apply to the videos it’s reacting against.

There’s a regulator angle here too, though it points at his rivals, not him. In September 2024 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission launched Operation AI Comply, suing several “AI-powered” business-opportunity schemes. In the FBA Machine case, the agency said consumers lost more than $15.9 million; in the Click Profit action, a fifth of customers earned nothing after fees and another third made under $2,500. Hormozi is describing the disappointment those cases prove is real. He’s just doing it from the selling side of the same market.

Who actually wins this game

Three groups pull ahead with AI, and none of them are “anyone who downloads Claude.” First, people who already have distribution — Hormozi’s own point about media leverage. A creator with an audience or a business with a paid-traffic budget can turn cheaper content into more sales; a beginner with neither just makes more content nobody sees. Second, operators with existing domain skill, who use AI to remove a bottleneck they already understand. Third, the young, narrow startups MIT flagged, who built the business around the model instead of sprinkling the model onto an old business.

Notice the through-line. AI multiplies leverage you already have. It doesn’t manufacture leverage you lack.

What you’d realistically earn

If you’re a solo person hoping AI is the missing piece, the honest range is uncomfortable. For the first several months, most people in this position make roughly nothing new — they save time, which is not the same as earning money, and often spend the saved time on work that doesn’t sell. The Census and MIT figures both point the same way: usage is common, incremental revenue is rare.

Where AI does pay, it tends to pay indirectly — a freelancer who delivers faster and takes on more clients, a small shop whose ad creative converts a point or two better, a writer who ships more. Those are real gains, plausibly a few hundred dollars a month scaling with the underlying business. They are not passive, and they are not the “AI does it all” story. Hormozi’s implicit claim — that the number for most people is close to zero unless they fix a real business constraint — matches the evidence better than the videos promising $10,000 a month.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This video is genuinely useful if you already run something — a service business, a store, a client practice — and you’ve been measuring activity instead of profit. His “return to the constraint” framing is sound and free. It’s less useful, maybe even discouraging in the wrong way, if you’re at zero and looking for a first income stream; his advice assumes a business already exists to make more efficient. And treat the roadmap at the end as marketing, not a neutral gift.

What to remember

Hormozi is right that AI is a multiplier, not a money printer, and the MIT, Census, and Fed data all support the deflated version of the hype. The caveat is that “won’t make you rich” depends heavily on who you are and what leverage you already hold — and that this particular video is itself a well-built pitch. Skepticism is the right tool here. Just point it in every direction, including his.

For a grounded look at what beginners can actually build, see our takes on 5 proven ways to make money with AI with no experience and how I’d make money with Claude AI in 2026 if I had to start over.