how creators can ACTUALLY grow their business with AI

There aren’t many people on X who understand how to actually turn AI into revenue without getting lost in the hype.

While everyone seems to be chasing the next $100K monthly recurring revenue software or building increasingly complex agent systems, Machina (@exm7777) is focused on something much simpler: using AI as leverage to make existing businesses work better.

That point of view comes from actual experience. He’s building agencies, designing AI systems, running research agents around the clock, and learning how to slowly extract himself from the process while also making sure that the product remains useful.

If you ask Machina, the concept is quite simple: AI itself isn’t the business. Instead, it’s a tool to leverage into success. And the people who win will still be the best salespeople, marketers, and operators. They’ll just move a lot faster.

We talked to him about making money with AI, building systems that run without you, and what actually separates the people doing the work from the people farming engagement.

Here’s what he had to say:

Article by @powvibess

What’s an AI money-making play that’s actually working right now that you think people are still sleeping on?

You have to be left curve to make easy money with AI right now.

The mid curve is where money goes to die: building another SaaS, developing memory systems for agents, integrating complex systems into large businesses, trying to rebuild a whole industry with AI.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of solopreneurs and small businesses haven’t even started their AI transition. Build a very simple outreach system and pitch these companies the transformation of ONE department. That’s it.

Rebuild their sales workflow with AI at the core, or their accounting, or their marketing. Pick one single vertical and you can deliver serious results with very simple agents.

Take SEO/AEO. It’s a documented field. There’s no secret to it. You train agents on the topic, build custom strategies, and execute for your clients:

Agents researching materials for your client’s content 24/7.

> Writing pieces people search for.

> Doing outreach for backlinks.

> Automating parasite SEO.

Then you apply that same skeleton to every client. Research and competition monitoring do the job.

It’s the basic agency business model, what I started with and still run, and it teaches you everything you need to know about making money and managing a company.

Everyone is chasing the 100K MRR SaaS or raising millions for another sales AI agent. Dumb it down. Go back to the essence of business. It just works.

Everyone talks about AI like it can be an infinite money printer. What part of that is actually real, and what part is people getting sold a dream?

The dream being sold is that AI alone is what makes you rich.

I don’t know a single person who made significant cash without proper business understanding. AI is leverage, the strongest we’ve ever had, but without sales or marketing experience, everything you ship is slop.

I also hate the gold rush concept. Opportunities emerge and trends last 6–9 months, sure, but there won’t come a day where making money with AI as leverage becomes impossible.

We’re living in a very slow world. A year from now, we’ll have intelligence we can’t even imagine today, and the vast majority of businesses still won’t understand what an AI agent is.

The gap between what the models can do and what businesses run on keeps widening, and you get paid to close it.

The only real rush is access to intelligence.

If you’re living outside the US, you’ll soon be cut off from frontier intelligence. That’s a thing. Other labs are 6–9 months behind, and if you’re moving fast, that’s a gap you can’t afford.

You’re going to see a lot of nomads and businesses relocate for it.

That said, a model like Opus 4.6 is more than enough for most operators to make multiple millions online.

AI will never be the differentiator. The money goes to the best salesman or the best marketer, never to the best AI operator.

Say a creator wants to use AI to do 10x the work. What can they do to turn that into an actual increase in incomewhile avoiding just making slop?

Deep, multiphase research is the most underpriced spend in AI right now.

I have agents researching topics, software, YouTube, and dozens of sources almost 24/7, and I spend over $1,000 per month on research alone.

Building your own knowledge base should be your absolute priority. I can’t think of a better way to spend money on AI.

And you can equip your AI with taste by merging taste from multiple people into one source.

I research AI papers, blogs from smart people that inspire me, niche YouTube channels, marketing assets… anything different from what everyone else is consuming.

The knowledge base applies to any business, but it works even better for marketing and content because those require judgment of what’s good, and AI needs proper references to judge.

Then, if you want real leverage, put yourself out of the equation.

Master the art of extracting your thinking, your vision, and your execution into a compact goal you send to an agent.

A system of subagents, loops, and scheduled tasks does the job overnight. You wake up in the morning. Review, iterate, ship.

Feeds are flooded with AI content now. Does using AI help you stand out or bury you deeper? How can someone set themselves apart while still using AI?

Fix your inputs first.

Set up a second feed following only practitioners and labs. Forget the hype. Follow people sharing their workflows and the labs to see where we’re going.

Then run your own research agents on the side.

Every social has APIs/MCPs now. You plug them into something like Hermes Agent, monitor a few sources, and get a morning brief with the signal.

When a topic is interesting, go deep: scan every social for real people sharing real stuff, mine YouTube, launch deep research… get a real report instead of a feed’s opinion.

On the output side, growing on X comes down to dumbing things down and sharing real stuff you actually built… plus enough copywriting to stop the scroll.

People scroll fast, and if you can’t hook them in one line or with media, you’re done.

You can use AI to write, but you must always be the one in control.

The workflow I’d hand anyone:

Talk your idea out loud into Willow or WisprFlow. Have Claude interview you to dig deeper into your thinking. When you’re grilled enough, have it structure the idea into sections. Then write the thing yourself.

If you were to tell people to set up one AI system that runs in the background and makes money while they sleep, what would you have them build first?

Nothing makes money while you sleep on day one.

Autonomy is earned. You babysit everything first, and after weeks of iteration, the system earns the right to run without you.

Start with a research system: agents monitoring your niche, your competitors, and your sources around the clock, delivering a morning brief.

That brief feeds everything downstream: your content and your offers and your outreach.

Then extract yourself piece by piece. Every task you review in the morning and change nothing about is a task the system now owns.

That’s the real path to the background machine, not a template you install on day one.

What’s the skill that actually separates people who make money with AI from people who just farm engagement?

The ability to extract your own vision and thinking and translate them into a system that runs without you 90% of the time.

That’s what lets you move very fast, in parallel, on multiple projects… test and fail fast, iterate, learn a lot.

It only requires a basic understanding of AI agents.

The real skill is system design: how do I reduce my input as much as possible so the system runs as long as possible without me, without producing slop?

What do the ones who pull it off actually do that everyone else doesn’t know about or skips?

They’re agile.

They go all in on one niche, one business model, for about 3 months. They set up the systems and add as much leverage as they can to the work.

If results don’t show, they rotate and tweak.

A lot of success in business comes from testing. I’m testing on X all the time, introducing new concepts constantly.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but ultimately you crack the formula.

If you are looking for new creative talent to work with, wether they are contractors or full time, check out vetted:

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