I’m going to rank the most popular AI tools that everybody’s heard about that can actually make you money and build wealth in 2026.
Some of these tools can 10x your business and income, while others are just a massive waste of time.
S tier — non-negotiable for the future
A tier — widespread but not universally known
B tier — niche but valuable
C tier — might work in rare cases, but most won’t see consistent ROI
F tier — don’t bother
1. Midjourney
What it does: It allows you to take prompts and generate images. It was like one of those early apps that when ChatGPT came out, people were using it because it essentially used the same prompt structure to create images.
Can you make money? Yeah. A lot of people use Midjourney and act as a service to create brand packages or website designs or any visual Photoshop type thing. Easy to use, super simple.
The problem: I just don’t think long term it’ll be there. It is kind of niche. You can do a lot of this in other tools.
Verdict: B Tier
2. Runway ML
What it does: Essentially, this is an AI powered video generating tool. You can use it to create marketing collateral, walkthroughs. Think of any video generation. So you can get paid to do it for other businesses. You can also use it in your business to create marketing collateral.
I think the easy use, it’s not there. It’s a lot harder to use than most of these tools. But I think like long-term, it’s pretty good.
It is for video creators for sure, but it’s less for like everyday use.
Verdict: B Tier
3. 11 Labs
What it does: Produces uber realistic AI voices.
If you’re in a business that generates a lot of creative that has voiceovers — It’s super powerful, huge opportunity to make a ton of money, do it for yourself as a marketing thing, easy to use. They’ve also been around for a while.
The upside: Easy to use. Future of voice.
Verdict: A Tier — It’s fantastic for content creators. Not essential for every business, but right on the edge.
4. HeyGen
What it does: It allows you to create AI avatar videos from just text and it’s kind of leading the front. There’s a few other ones that are like coming up and they still are in private beta. But HeyGen is really cool and a lot of people are using it for creating training videos, product explainers, marketing videos. Essentially, it’s a way for you to scale your content output.
It’s a fun tool but limited use depending on your business.
Money-making: If you convince a business owner to use it, they’ll pay you to set it up.
Verdict: B Tier — Runway has a better product suite. Better than Midjourney, not as good as Runway.
5. Gamma.app
What it does: It’s like having a full-time designer on your team to generate reports, proposals, outputs. And it’s awesome.
The money-making is there. I just think that most people can use this tool, so they’ll just do it themselves.
The upside: Easy to use. Is it going to be relevant for the future? They seem to be the category winner in the space.
Verdict: S Tier — This one’s controversial but I’m going here. Every business could use it. Make everything you produce prettier. Visuals are good. Teams communicate better.
6. Leonardo.ai
What it does: It generates concept art and branded visuals. So if you ever had the idea of like, oh, I want to start my own like Nike, you could do this really easily.
Who it’s for: The styles, the flexibility, it makes it ideal for designers. Designers love this tool. But can you make money with this? For most people, you kind of need to be a designer.
Is it easy to use? Yep, relatively easy. Is it going to be relevant for the future? Again, it’s competitive. It has a strong niche appeal.
The problem is when you generate branded material, you’ll have sometimes hallucination. So the consistency is not there. Designers do love it, but limited to broad use.
Verdict: B Tier — It’s very niche, but valuable.
7. Zapier
What it does: It’s a tool that helps you automate your business processes. They’ve been around forever, way before AI.
6,000 apps to automate your workflow. The cool part is no code required. I know hundreds of agencies that are using Zapier to make a ton of money, automate business processes. It’s relatively easy.
When you get into more sophisticated stuff, it gets there.
I’m giving this S Tier. This one is one that’s foundation to any modern business. Putting it above Gamma.
8. Gum Loop
What it does: It’s a visual AI workflow builder. Automate workflows, and more visual than Zapier.
I think you can make money with this. It’s a lot higher on ease of use even though it’s newer in a smaller community, but I just don’t think you need it if you’ve got Zapier.
Verdict: A Tier — Solid option. Putting it in front of 11 Labs.
9. N8N
What it does: Open source workflow automation.
Open source means that the code base is available for anybody to look at it. So you don’t have to worry if the company’s doing things right because you can actually audit the code.
You don’t have to pay for licenses. It’s essentially free if you can set up your own servers.
Who’s it for: It’s a little best suited for like developers. I think it’s going to be relevant cuz it is the open-source tool of choice right now amongst technical people.
You can make money because it’s automation. A lot a lot of people use it for more complicated workflows, but the learning curve is a lot harder.
Verdict: A Tier — You need a tool for workflow, but you don’t need that tool.
10. Your.com (Atlas)
What it does: Automates anything voice and phone call and acts as like a revenue tool for you. Outbound qualifying, inbound responses.
A lot of people are using Atlas to get paid to set this up for companies so you can make money really quick.
The learning curve is not that high. You just need to understand basic prompt engineering.
And then the future of voice and AI. I think every interface in the future will go away and it’ll all be voice. You’re probably doing this right now with AI. You’re talking to it a lot.
Verdict: S Tier — It’s an S.
11. Fixer.ai
What it does: Fixer AI is essentially an email AI tool. So it’ll help you like categorize your email, get sorted. It’s a tool to help you be more productive in your inbox.
Can you make money with it? It’ll save you time. I don’t think you can like get paid from other people to set it up.
Learning how to use it is always a little bit difficult with kind of workflows because you probably have a certain way you like to use your inbox.
Verdict: C Tier — Cool, but not a must.
12. Notion AI
What it does: Notion is a project management workspace for businesses. The AI specific is their assistant. It’s built into Notion that helps you with writing and taking notes and organizational.
Cool part is it integrates naturally with your existing workspace within notion. So if you use notion, thumbs up.
Money making — It’s still not where I need it to be. And I don’t think anybody’s going to pay you just for the AI part. They might pay you to set up notion for them.
It’s easy to use. Love the interface integrated.
Long-term? Well, if you didn’t see that OpenAI launched company knowledge, which is this new product that is going to try to be the search or the brain on top of your business knowledge, that’s where I think like a notion AI might lose some ground.
Verdict: C Tier — It’s cool. I just think it’s tough to justify, but I am going to put it in front of fixer. I think check out the notion AI. It actually can do some cool stuff, specifically if you’re a notion company.
13. Buddy Pro
What it does: Think of it this way. If you had a knowledge base or a brain, an AI brain that was specifically trained on just your company’s information and then your clients instead of calling you, they could call Buddy Pro or instead of your team asking you, they could ask Buddy Pro. That’s what it does.
Do I think it’ll save you money? Hell yeah. Think about all those support emails, right? The support emails only work if they’ve been properly trained. So now all of a sudden, Buddy Pro can power the response.
I think every business can use it. I think it’ll save you a lot of money, and it’s a really smart way to solve the problem long term that’s completely different than just like a custom GPT.
Verdict: A Tier (end of list) — Will save you a lot of money.
14. Granola.ai
What it does: Records calls on your end and automatically generates notes and action items. People don’t know you’re recording. It’s not meant to be sneaky. It’s meant for you to take notes from Zoom call so that you have clear understanding of what’s been said, recaps and action items and all that stuff. And it does it automagically.
And the cool part is it works across all the major video platforms.
Do I think it’ll save you money? If you’re not the kind of person that writes things down, yes. If you don’t have somebody in your meetings, yes.
Easy for you to use? Yes. Literally click, click, install, it starts working.
Is it going to be the one that’s going to win the future? Amongst all my smart technical AI people, it’s their favorite and that’s usually a good sign.
Verdict: S Tier — I think everybody should use Granola. It’s in front of Atlas for sure. Even in front of Gamma. Check it out. You’ll be happy you do.
15: ChatGPT
The big dog, the one that started it all.
What it does: Conversational AI for writing, coding, automation. It does more than most people realize.
Obviously, it’s going to make you a ton of money. It’s incredibly easy to use. Literally, if you want to learn how to use AI, ask AI. It’ll tell you.
They’ve raised so much money that they’re at the point where they’re too big to fail.
Verdict: #1 S Tier — Dominating the market. Use it. If you’re not using it, learn it.
16. Claude
What it does: AI by Anthropic. It’s specifically good for writing and for code. Yes, GPT5 is getting better, but still on certain types of projects, it’s still winning there.
Will it make you money? Less than ChatGPT because I think it’s a use case if you’re not using as much.
It’s very easy to use.
Are they going to be around long term? Yeah, they’re not going anywhere.
Verdict: A Tier — Putting it in front of Zapier.
17. Perplexity.ai
What it does: Perplexity was the first search engine that was powered by AI. Now it’s kind of like everywhere. ChatGPT launched Atlas, their own browser. Google’s got the AI answers integrated into search results, but Perplexity was the first one.
And what’s unique is that feedback is verified sources, which is cool because sometimes you have hallucination with the other language models.
In many ways, it’s kind of a novelty.
I’m not going to put it even after Granola.
Verdict: A Tier — We’re going to go Zapier, Granola, Perplexity.
18. Gemini
What it does: Google’s AI. What Google is doing that it’s got an advantage over is that it integrates all of its existing tools.
So if you’re not a Google ecosystem customer, then I’m going to put it third behind Claude.
Verdict: A Tier — Third behind Claude.
19. Notebook LM
What it does: Essentially, it’s Google’s AI for analyzing and summarizing files, information, research.
There’s one use case that I think most people don’t know about where you can feed it to like YouTube videos and actually tell it to like talk to you through the videos, but it generates like a narrative back and forth. It’s like creating your own podcast.
Who’s it for: I think it’s really tailored for like researchers, writers, and students. So it’s not an every company. I wouldn’t even say it’s an A. It’s kind of a niche thing.
Verdict: C Tier — It’s interesting, but it’s not necessarily needed.
20. Grok
Elon buys X, takes the AI team, spins it out as X AI, brands it as Grok, raises a bunch of money, built this crazy data center.
What it does: It is the best one for accuracy, depth of research that I found.
I think it’s better than Gemini. I think he’s going to beat Claude and I think it’s going to be number two behind open eyes ChatGPT. That’s where I’m putting it.
Verdict: A Tier — Better than Gemini. Will beat Claude. And behind ChatGPT.
21. Ravio
What it does: AI sales assistant for chat.
If you do any kind of selling over chat, I’m talking support emails, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, then having an AI sales assistant is key.
Can it make you money? Yes. Most people don’t know that if you talk to your followers on social media, those are called leads. You make money with leads.
Is it going to be relevant long-term? I think so.
Verdict: C Tier — Niche, but tough to justify unless you’re selling on social.
22. Lovable
What it does: It helps people that are not technical build apps.
The cool part is you can use ChatGPT to write the prompt to then insert it into Lovable so that it can create the app the way you want.
I think the future of business is these disposable apps that help run departments. Right now, we use spreadsheets. In the future will be apps. Lovable is that platform.
Money making? People that make a lot of money selling Lovable apps to businesses and charge $10,000, $15,000 for these apps that AI generated. And a lot of businesses that are using it for that disposable idea to save time to build automation.
You need to know how to prompt, so it’s not as easy to use, but they’re well funded.I think they’ll be around for a while.
Verdict: B Tier — Future is going there, but other tools should come first in your business.
23. Cursor AI
What it does: t’s an AI coding assistant. It’s an IDE, an integrated development environment for you to write code.
Who’s it for: If you’re a technical person, Cursor is crazy cool. It’s super technical, super nerdy.
Verdict: C Tier — It’s really cool. It’s just super niche.
How To Actually Start
I can understand that it might feel super overwhelming.
Don’t try to use everything.
Here’s what I want to encourage you to do now.
Take the one that you were like, “Oh, that’s interesting. I could see how I would use that in my business.”
Then spend the next two weeks installing it. Like right now, go install it. Set it up. Force yourself to build the new habit to use it.
Go do a project and start trying to habit stack. Connect using that new AI tool to another habit in your workday so it becomes second nature.
That’s how you start the process of using these Ai tools and frameworks to make you a lot more money and get a lot more time back.
If you’re just starting out, here are some easy AI side hustles to bring in some extra cash.
This post is based on insights shared by Dan Martell, who’s tested hundreds of AI tools while building and scaling AI-driven businesses.
Leave a Reply