9 AI Skills That Will Make You Rich in 2026 — Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Marina Mogilko: In the next 12 months, the biggest paychecks won't go to people with fancy degrees or fancy titles. They'll go to the ones who master AI skills that matter. They'll go to solopreneurs who single-handedly solve problems with AI. What we're seeing right now is that entry-level jobs are being disrupted. Software is becoming a commodity. I recently interviewed the founder of Replit and he told me about people who just vibe coded companies that are making millions. Basically what they're doing is building on top of ChatGPT. Yes, they're wrapping it beautifully, but a lot of AI companies that we see these days are basically a set of prompts for ChatGPT and they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars. I personally know some of those people.

So what makes these people different? Number one, deep understanding of their target market and customers. They are solving problems for a very particular group of people. A lot of those people are solving problems they once experienced. Number two, AI skills. They know exactly what tool to use, how to use that tool to quickly build a product of their dreams or automate a function at a top level. In this video, I'll break down nine AI skills anyone can start from zero. They'll help you work faster, earn more, and maybe even build the next billion dollar company. Trust me, the last one is a total game changer. So let's dive in.

Skill number one is no code AI app development. Something that I've mentioned already in this video. It's just fascinating how today you don't need to be a programmer to launch your own AI powered product. While I was talking to Jud at Replit, I was actually vibe coding something and he was like your prompts are not good enough and there were some bugs. But he told me it's going to take me two days to build a fully working AI app. That means I can start testing things within a week.

A simple example would be building a service that automatically writes blog posts based on YouTube videos. You choose a video that went viral and got millions of views. The app extracts the transcript, generates an article, and publishes it on your site. Of course, you have to say like this is what I learned from this video and refer to the author. But content creation is getting really commoditized and you can build this app for yourself. You can also let others use it and there is no code involved in this.

The tools you can use: Replit, which I already mentioned, includes templates and bots. There is another platform called Agent. You can use it to build AI apps like stacking blocks. There is a company called Bolt. It's a visual builder where you can connect models and interfaces in a few clicks. After you watch this video, spend at least 10 minutes vibe coding. This skill opens the door to launching your own products. You're not just using AI, you're actually creating solutions that could become real businesses.

Skill number two is building no code AI agents, something that we've been playing with a lot recently. In the past few weeks, we built a couple of AI agents and they're working and they're doing things. Basically what happens with ChatGPT is it just gives you an answer. But an AI agent actually completes tasks for you. They can send emails, fetch data, publish posts, remind you of deadlines all in the background without you lifting a finger.

For example, if you have an inbox where customers reach out to you, you can build an agent that receives an incoming email from a client, checks your internal database if the client exists, composes a reply, and sends it automatically with zero input from you. Having an AI agent is like having a 24/7 employee.

Last week one of our videos was not performing. The thing that's really working right now for a lot of people is that they post a lot of shorts that were made from that video. But for us to post 15 shorts, we would need at least two people. One person would be working with Opus Clip and making sure the clips are good. Another person would be posting. Instead of doing that, we just built an AI agent and my producer can basically click a button. It takes a video and creates multiple shorts, not just using Opus Clip's algorithm, but also using ChatGPT to check whether the titles are good enough. It really speeds things up.

Think about a process that's very repeatable and really manual. There are processes in our company where we just delegate them to my assistant. Sometimes she answers it and she's not happy about it because she has other things to do. Now, before actually delegating to her, we would try and build an AI agent to save her time for more important tasks and to automate this process that's really manual and doesn't require any creativity.

Skill number three is workflow automation. The tools that we use to build our agents, we use N8N, which is a very intuitive visual tool where you connect blocks and create an agent by doing that. There are GPTs by OpenAI. You can build your own assistant inside ChatGPT by configuring instructions, functions, and even actions through plugins. An AI agent actually learns during the process and can change things in a workflow. If that sounds too complicated, you can just build a workflow that doesn't think. It just follows the steps that you've created. If X happens, then do Y, then Z. And this becomes a workflow that runs without your involvement.

A good example is cutting shorts from a video that already exists on YouTube. The way this automation works is that we have Google Sheets where we store links to all of our new videos. Then we have N8N that actually runs the automation. It grabs the latest video link. Then Clap AI automatically cuts vertical clips based on emotional peaks. Then GPT writes clickworthy titles and descriptions for each clip. And then we use YouTube API to upload up to 10 shorts per day with ready to go captions. No editor, no manager, just an automated pipeline. As a result, we have new videos that go live daily, creating stable traffic flow without human involvement. These are basically free ads for a podcast with zero editing costs. So it's basically free traffic from the algorithm.

I mentioned N8N that you can use for this, but there are also other tools. There's Make.com or Zapier. These are visual platforms to build automations. We feel like N8N is more flexible and logic-based. If you are in the production business making content, Clap AI, Opus, and Descript are the AI-powered video generation and editing tools. Of course you use GPT plus API integrations to generate titles, descriptions, and tags and to post on different platforms.

Here's something I kept thinking about when starting a new project. You can automate workflows, delegate tasks, even use AI agents to save time. But the moment you want to sell a physical product, the big question becomes, where do you find it? Because it can be AI generated. If you've ever dreamed of launching your own store—clothing, stationary, homegoods, or gifts—Super Delivery is a great place to start. It's a Japanese B2B wholesale platform where you can order high-quality products in small batches with worldwide shipping. And the best part, if you're purchasing from outside Japan, you don't have to pay Japanese VAT. So the prices are already small business-friendly.

Even if you just run a small Etsy or Shopify store or sell through Instagram shops or similar platforms, registration takes only a couple minutes and you can start right away. I found so many unique items there from minimalist kitchen ware to stylish accessories. I actually love everything that's connected with Japan. So if you're also interested in Japanese trends, I recommend checking out their special made in Japan feature page—a curated selection of goods made in Japan, noted for their outstanding quality and attention to detail. And if you're just getting started and want to test the platform with great deals, take a look at the first purchase discounts page. It's a collection of specially priced items available exclusively to new buyers. You simply add items to your cart and that's it. No supplier negotiations, no minimum orders in the thousands.

If you're exploring e-commerce, launching a new product line, or just looking for your next big idea, I genuinely recommend checking out Super Delivery. This video is made in collaboration with Super Delivery.

Now let's move on to the next AI skill you absolutely need in 2025, and that's API integrations for AI workflows. Remember how I mentioned that we use API integration to publish things on YouTube? Basically, to make neural networks truly efficient, you need to connect them to other tools like CRM, email, spreadsheets, cloud storage, YouTube, calendars. All of this becomes possible through APIs, which allows software tools to talk to each other. If you know how to work with APIs, you can link dozens of AI tools, build custom solutions, and automate things that no one else can.

Here's our real case: how we connected AI to YouTube and other tools via API. We used YouTube's official API and connected it to N8N. It's not a straightforward process, not just like you click one button and you're connected. There are actually a couple things we needed to sort out. First, we had to set up authentication to use YouTube API. That required creating a project in Google Cloud Console, generating tokens, getting approved. It's not obvious for beginners. We have someone on the team who helps us with that.

And then there are also API quota limits. Google restricts the number of API requests per day. When trying to upload more than 10 videos a day, we ran into errors and had to optimize the flow. To send videos via API, we had to build precise JSON requests with all publishing parameters. So it's not really trivial. We still had issues with some video formats. Some tools incorrectly process long videos, returned errors, and we had to add format checks and fallback logic.

Some tools that helped us with that process: Postman is great for testing and debugging API requests before launching. Again, N8N to visually configure nodes for YouTube upload, Google authentication, and file fetch. GPT-4 documentation to generate and adjust JSON request templates for YouTube. Of course, we used YouTube Data API, the foundation for publishing and analytics. But when you start working with APIs, you're no longer limited to pre-made templates. You decide what should happen, when, and how, and you build systems that actually deliver what you want.

If you're technical enough, I'd recommend trying and automating a process of posting by yourself. If you're not technical enough, then hiring someone who is an AI intern or an AI person, an AI contractor on your team—that's the actual new job now. We have two people like that on our team helping us automate things.

Skill number five is AI powered data analysis. We live in a world where everyone has access to data, but only those who act on data win. We try to quantify every process in our company. And there are AI tools that allow you to go beyond just reading tables. They help you identify patterns, extract insights, visualize, and even forecast outcomes faster and deeper than manual analysis.

For example, we have a spreadsheet with video views over the last three months. Instead of summarizing it manually, we feed it into an AI model and it identifies which days of the week get the most views, suggests the best video length for our channel, recommends topic ideas likely to boost traffic, and generates a dashboard with charts instantly.

Tools that we use: Excel plus AI plugins. They can create charts and summaries from natural language prompts. ChatGPT advanced data analysis. Upload your CSV or Excel file and the model cleans your data, builds visualizations, and explains what it means, why, and how it impacts results. There's also Wolfram plus ChatGPT. It runs advanced calculations, statistics, and forecasting. It's really important to start working with big data because this skill is basically your pocket AI analyst. I remember we actually had an analyst on our team at Lingurip. Now we don't need a person like that. We just need to know what questions to ask and the model gives us the full picture in minutes.

Skill number six is multimodal prompt engineering. The world isn't just text-based. AI models today can understand and generate images, videos, audio, even 3D content. That means you can interact with them using layered, complex instructions. And that's what multimodal prompting is all about. You don't just say make a thumbnail. You give a precise creative brief: Create a YouTube short style thumbnail for a video about AI. Primary colors are black. In the center, put a large GPT logo. In the background, put blurred robots. On the left side, AI versus human in glitch style typography.

GPT-4 can work with text, images, and tables. It's perfect for detailed visual prompts. Then you can use Runway, Pika, or Sora to generate video scenes based on text. And again, prompting is everything here. A good prompt is like make a scene of a girl working through neon light in Blade Runner style. Midjourney or DALL-E to generate high-quality images from text prompts. 11 Labs or Pseudo AI to generate and understand audio from voiceovers to music.

Basically we see how prompting became the new interface language and the clearer and more precise your prompt is the better the result. When Amja told me that my prompting wasn't good enough, I asked him how can I improve my prompting and he said of course by experimenting—try at least five times to see different results. Also in my company we keep a prompt journal that we share with everyone with successful examples and their results.

Skill number seven is AI video editing and repurposing in 2025. Success isn't just about creating content. It's about repackaging it fast and at scale. One long video can turn into 10 short form clips optimized for Shorts, Reels, and TikTok. And automating that is a whole new job that a lot of creators are trying to learn. A lot of creators are looking for solutions like that. It's not just about identifying what's going to go viral. It's also about adding music, creating the right title, publishing it to the platform.

The next skill is custom AI model training. General models like GPT know a lot, but they don't know you. If you want an AI to write in your tone, understand your niche, or generate content tailored to your brand, you need to train it on your own data. That's what custom training is—turning a general purpose model into your own personal AI assistant and also making sure you can transfer prompts to your team so they can use your tone of voice.

We train a GPT model on our own database of scripts and video titles. As a result, it can predict which content topics will perform well with our audience. Basically we created an AI version of us to hopefully help us test before we publish. Our custom GPT writes titles in our signature style, adjusts text to fit both short and long form formats, matches the tone of our channels, and avoids clichés.

There are a few tools that can help. Replicate to train and host custom models on your own databases. Pearlabs or Runway. They create AI generated visuals that follow a consistent style. OpenAI fine tuning—of course train GPT models on your own text, FAQs, messages, or content examples. You can also create your own custom GPTs. You can trigger instructions, files, and behavior with no coding required. It's basically creating your own AI clone. It works in your niche. It understands your goals and writes like you but faster. And it's tireless.

And the last skill is AI app monetization strategy—basically monetizing AI products. We talked a lot about building AI apps and that's half of the job. The other half is packaging it, launching it, and trying to make it not only helpful for yourself, but also helpful for a lot of other people. When we're building some tools for our company, we're always trying to test them on a smaller audience to see if someone would pay us to use this tool.

I feel like for everyone who's watching, a great way to start is to build something for yourself, see if you're actually using it, and then just talk to your friends about it like, "Hey, I built this. Look what it delivers. Would you pay for something like that?" Because if you use a vibe coding platform like Replit, you can connect Stripe and you can start collecting payments.

For example, we created a bot called Ghostwriter on Telegram that is trained to write in a style that performs well on LinkedIn or X or email. You can basically choose where you want to post. This is something I built for myself because if I have an idea, I want it to be on every single platform. So I just talk to this bot and then I click LinkedIn or I click email and it generates text. And I can also do both languages because I'm present both in Russian and English. So it's basically my copywriter and we decided to make it available to everyone as a Telegram bot. We installed monetization inside Telegram and voila, we have a small but stable income stream. I think it's a pretty cool tool. I think it's pretty useful for all of you guys who are building cool projects but never make money.

Monetization isn't about selling. It's about delivering value in a way people will pay for. I hope this video inspired you to not only build something, but also think about ways you can turn what you've built into an actual business. Because as you know, I love building multiple income streams and it gives me some kind of stability, but also gives my imagination a way to experiment with different ideas.