Top 10 AI Skills to Learn in 2026 high income skills to learn in 2026
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.
Skill #1: Prompt Engineering — $50 to $100 Per Hour
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.
How to Communicate With AI
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.
Define the AI's Role
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.
Provide Data and Examples
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.
Make the Ask Specific
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.
Request the Right Format
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.
Skill #2: AI-Assisted Software Development — $100 to $200 Per Hour
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.
Building Software Without Traditional Programming
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.
Use AI to Learn AI Software Tools
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.
Find a Real Problem
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.
Build and Deploy the Solution
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.
Skill #3: AI Design — $100 to $200 Per Hour
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.
Generative AI Image Creation
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 skill number three, AI design. With income potential between 100 and 200 an hour, isn't it wild how quick things have moved?
AI Photo Editing
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.
AI Web Design
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.
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.
Number three, web design. Not only can you use AI to design the websites, you can use it to actually code the websites.
Skill #4: AI Video Editing — $100 to $200 Per Hour
Which brings us to skill number four, AI video editing with income potential between 100 and 200 an hour.
AI Video Clipping
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.
Generative AI Video
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.
AI-Powered B-Roll Search
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.
Number two is generative video. This is super cool because you can help somebody create an AI avatar.
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.
Skill #5: AI Writing — $100 to $200 Per Hour
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.
Content Extraction
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.
AI Content Ideation
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.
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.
AI-Assisted Content Creation
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.
Skill #6: AI Content Marketing — $200 to $300 Per Hour
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.
Define the Content Strategy
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.
Create Content With AI
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.
Repurpose Content Across Platforms
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?
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.
Skill #7: No-Code AI Automation — $300 to $400 Per Hour
Which brings us to skill number seven, no code AI automation with income potential between 300 and 400 an hour.
Map the Business Workflow
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.
Focus on Revenue and Savings
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.
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.
Build AI Copilots
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?
Skill #8: AI Data Analysis — $300 to $400 Per Hour
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.
Data Cleanup
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.
Data Enrichment
So, here's how you can get paid to do AI data analysis. Number one, data cleanup. Most businesses have the messiest data.
Number two, data enrichment. Most businesses have no clue that you can even do this.
Extract Valuable Data Insights
Number three is data insight extraction. You get paid to help people understand the information.
Pulling out the insights, the recommendations, monitoring things. AI is now set up so you can take data and get insights in a click.
Skill #9: No-Code AI Agent Development — $400 to $500 Per Hour
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.
Define the AI Agent's Job
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.
Develop and Train the AI Model
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?
Deploy and Monitor the AI Agent
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.
The Future Belongs to AI-Powered Professionals
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.
0 Comments