5 BEST AI Businesses To Start before 2026 (For Beginners) — Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Marina Mogilko: You probably heard the news and seen the headlines that say you only have 12 months to build your wealth because after that superhuman AI is coming. AGI is happening and that's it. There is this new AI 2027 forecast report by a former OpenAI researcher that lays out what's about to happen month by month and it claims that by 2027 AI will reshape society more than the industrial revolution did. We're talking AI agents replacing entire departments from research to coding to operators.

And while this sounds like science fiction and really negative, the money pouring in proves it's real. Top venture funds including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Coasta Ventures and others have collectively invested roughly 160 billion into AI startups in the past 18 months, fueling some of the largest and most transformative funding rounds in history. Meta alone has spent over 65 billion, reinventing itself as an AI-first company.

Here's some good news. The real opportunities aren't locked in by the giants yet. I don't know what's going to happen later, but for now, they're open to entrepreneurs who can move fast, spot the gaps, and build tools people actually need because you are at the forefront of your problems. And the report that I mentioned before is also super clear on the fact that the early movers capture almost all the wealth. Waiting might mean you'll be too late.

So in this video, I'll break down five AI business ideas you can launch in the next 12 months. And not just theory. You'll also hear advice from 2025 from great entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman, Aravind Srinivas, co-founder of Perplexity, and others. The best time to start is now before AGI. Let's dive in.

Let's talk about GPT wrappers. It's basically you take ChatGPT, you reprompt it. As basic as it sounds, it's actually been a good business for a lot of people because again, you wrap it with your own expertise. And if you're deep enough in the field, your GPT wrapper is so much better than the original GPT. And this type of creating is just perfect for beginners.

One of the fastest ways for newcomers to get started is using platforms like Replit, which turn natural language prompts into working apps with minimal coding. I love this example called CalAI that was created by an 18-year-old Zakia de Gary, whose nutrition and fitness app uses AI to analyze photos of meals and quickly estimates calories. Since launching in 2023, CalAI has been downloaded over 8 million times and is projected to generate 30 million this year. This proves that innovative AI wrappers can scale quickly with smart focus and simple MVPs.

These products are attractive because they solve real problems fast and as Daniel Priestley says, that's exactly what makes them scalable for first-time founders.

a special guest: The assumption is that there is value in knowing more than the customer about a particular thing, and you collect a bit of their data. You mix it with your amazing prompts that you've put a lot of thought into. You then put that into a new UX that's better than a chat UX. And between those three things—capturing data, prompting with a set of much better prompts, and also thinking about the UX more deeply—you're now creating something that is a specialized tool that's very valuable.

And a good analogy would be that a hundred and something years ago they created electricity and the electricity was this awesome, powerful thing. But then people came up with applications for electricity and they said, "Oh, we can channel this electricity and make a toaster. We can use this electricity to boil water and call it a kettle. Oh, what if we do this electricity into light bulbs?" So they channeled the electricity into these specialized applications and then those businesses became amazing standalone businesses.

Now imagine someone came up and said, "Oh, that's just an electricity wrapper, right? You're just wrapping electricity." You know, it's like, "Yeah, I am harnessing electricity, but we're harnessing it in a very particular way in a user experience that's perfect for boiling water and perfect for toasting toast." So LLMs are the new electricity. They do this amazing language generation or image generation or multimedia generation. And then it's up to us as entrepreneurs to say, can we improve upon that through UX, through better prompting, and through better ways of capturing user data? And if we can do those three things and then wrap that up together, we can create these amazing businesses. There's just thousands of little opportunities where you could create a 5 million a year business.

Marina Mogilko: Here's an action step. Pick an industry you already know and brainstorm three repetitive tasks you could automate. Wrap GPT around one of them, even in a simple Google Sheet plus API, and test it with five to 10 real users a week.

Business idea number two: AI marketing and media, and it has one of the easiest entry points. AI marketing tools automate content creation like captions, hashtags, voiceovers, and translations, helping creators and companies scale efficiently. A standout example here for me is Poppy AI, a bootstrap startup that grew to over 500,000 in monthly recurring revenue within its first year by helping marketers and content creators like me—we use them all the time—easily create viral social media content. Basically, you create a mind map with the reels or piece of content that you like. You also feed Poppy AI with your ideas and it comes up with a perfect post. And Poppy's success once again proves how powerful focused AI marketing tools can be, especially when solving real pain points with simple subscription pricing.

But if you're not into content creation, there is another exciting opportunity: building and monetizing your own AI voice. Voice AI is booming as more companies and creators want custom, high-quality voices for branding, advertising, and communication. Here is what Matti, founder of 11 Labs, shares.

a special guest: I have this number here where you paid $2 million in royalties to people who share their voices with 11 Labs. Can you talk about that? How can people start making money by sharing their voice with 11 Labs?

So it's one of the efforts we launched in the early days where we effectively created a voice marketplace and voice ecosystem where every person can create their own voice, go through an authentication flow. You need to record roughly 30 minutes or more of you speaking. Then you have a perfect replica of your own voice that speaks in the language you recorded plus all the languages we support. So you have usually 30 or so different variations. Now with the new model we are releasing, it will be 70. So you have the voice that's now available for your own use, and then if you decide you can share it to our marketplace and if you share it to our marketplace for a specific period of time and specific conditions of what you are sharing it for, then other people can use it across the 11 Labs ecosystem. And when your voice is being used, you get paid back as a result.

This way, we have now almost 10,000 voices that people shared and created. What is incredible is it spans so many different languages, accents, and different styles. So like now if you are logging into the platform, you just have this incredible plethora of voices and we pay voice creators back. So it was, I think, $2 million at the beginning of the year that we paid back and now, I think last time I checked it was a few months ago, we paid back $5 million to the entire community.

Marina Mogilko: Wow. How much does an average voice creator make?

a special guest: It really depends. I think it will be a lot of people in like a few hundred dollars per month category. And that's probably what you could expect if you do a little bit of effort. And what you could earn.

Marina Mogilko: Here's your action step. Record 10 minutes of your voice, clone it with 11 Labs, and list it on Fiverr or Voices.com. Test if anyone will buy your AI version. Maybe you have a unique accent or unique tone that people like. It's a fast experiment that costs nothing.

Number three: Agentic AI or AI employees. Very accessible, especially with today's no-code tools. Agentic AI is one of the most exciting frontiers in 2025. They are not just chatbots. They are autonomous AI employees that can complete multi-step tasks.

We live in this kind of bubble and it feels like everyone in the world is already using AI, but once you step out of your bubble, you realize there are so many businesses struggling with automating tasks. It's because they don't know. They have no idea. Not watching YouTube. There's this old-school brick-and-mortar real estate agency that doesn't use AI at all. You could be that person that comes in and says, "Hey, I can automate this for you because I figured it out." And the best part: you don't even need to be a programmer. There are no-code platforms like Replit that I mentioned. There's also Cursor, Lovable. My husband is upstairs coding something right now. He's not a coder, but four weeks ago he had no idea how to code. Now he just told me he coded an AI COO for himself to track how his employees work.

The key here is to pick a vertical—restaurants, real estate, e-commerce, whatever you like more—and build an AI employee that removes the most painful bottleneck. Choose your niche wisely, talk to your customers, and build something because I feel this is where the largest opportunity lies. You can be automating things for brick-and-mortar businesses who just figured out their websites and they haven't really figured out their social media strategy and now they have to figure out AI. You can be the person helping them.

And here's what Samir Vasavada, co-founder at Wise, shares.

a special guest: We had 150 people, 160 people at one point in time and now we are closer to 40 and we are doing 10 times better from a metric standpoint with 40 people than what we were doing with 160 people. What changed? AI, I think. I think AI changed. I think scalability changed—like the idea that how do we think about automating everything we do? And I think sometimes with AI, sometimes with this idea that we are going to manage 10 times the amount of accounts next year and 20 times the accounts the years after, how do we figure out? How do we design everything from scratch from a scalability standpoint?

So a good example is like client service. We had a six-person, seven-person client service team that was manual. They were manually sending out DocuSigns, you know, doing account openings, processing and all of these different things. And now we have a three-person team or two-person team, but handles probably 20 to 30 times the amount of accounts we had back then. And they figured out how to automate everything. And the first thing they did was, I'm actually not going to focus on client service. I'm going to focus on all the jobs to be done with. How do I eliminate myself?

Marina Mogilko: Exactly.

a special guest: And then they're overseeing all the systems so they can be highly, highly scalable.

Marina Mogilko: Here's your action step. Write down the top three bottlenecks in your business or in a business that you understand or you have access to. Maybe you know a lot of real estate agents. Ask yourself: could an AI intern handle them? Build a simple demo in Replit or with another no-code agent tool and run it with one of your customers for a week.

Number four: Healthcare and wellness AI. Wellness AI is rapidly expanding, covering fitness coaching, sleep tracking, nutrition, mental health, and chronic disease monitoring. I am a person who struggles with really high cholesterol. I think they're going to put me on statins. I've tried for a couple of years, but the thing is I'm talking a lot to ChatGPT about my diet. But what I realized is that ChatGPT is not a doctor. So I'm using this app called Superpower that has a built-in AI. Superpower not only has access to all my labs but also to medical data. So I can ask you more specific questions about specific foods and they automatically gonna pull up research or whatever doctors say and I will trust it more because when it comes to these important questions like health, yes sometimes you rely on ChatGPT but you don't want to rely on it too much.

I also notice how sometimes I just use one thread to ask all the questions and then I ask mental health advice and it's like, it's really bad. Somebody told me like, this is a tip for you: never ask for mental health advice in the same thread when you're using ChatGPT because it can really mess things up.

Anyways, for early founders focusing on wellness products rather than regulated medical diagnostics is a practical entry point offering high growth potential. Look at Superpower, how fast they're growing. Have they built out a hospital? No. Have they made preventative healthcare more accessible? Yes. And they've raised from amazing investors.

Learn from them. And here's what Reid Hoffman shares about healthcare.

a special guest: Where do you feel like the biggest change is going to happen with AI? Like what's going to be transformed?

I'm hoping healthcare. Well, I think healthcare is an obvious and very important one. Think about it: we have the technology today to have a medical assistant on your smartphone that's better than your average doctor that's available 24/7 to everyone with a smartphone that runs it under, you know, call it a couple dollars an hour in terms of compute costs to run it. We should get that as soon as possible.

That doesn't mean doctors out of work. There are all kinds of things for doctors to do because, among other things, the app may say, "Hey, these are the three things in most probability from these things," but then the doctor knows, "Oh, these are the things that I'm seeing in the symptoms that you didn't tell the AI that's actually really important that we need to do." There's all kinds of—and a doctor can spend more time with patients because the AI says, "Hey, look, I had this whole conversation with my medical assistant and here's what I came up with," and goes, "Oh, well, let's spend more time on this one and spend some time because that's all faster given the economics of it." So I think that is clearly going to happen. It should happen. It should happen as fast as possible.

Marina Mogilko: So here's your action step. Build a lightweight wellness tracker. For example, a Telegram bot that gives nutrition tips for a specific group of people or a Chrome extension that analyzes your sleep diary. Keep it non-medical and you can test with users immediately.

Now, this is my favorite: educational AI products. I have built several in the past year. Education is already being reshaped by AI. We have adaptive tutors who can prepare you for exams, teach you coding, or even role-play job interviews. We launched a GPT-powered TOEFL prep coach that tracks students' weak points and adjusts lessons on the fly. And people are willing to pay for that because we also have a real teacher on the back end teaching our AI how to prepare students. Engagement is rising dramatically because every student feels like they have a private coach, somebody who tracks their progress.

Another one is a tutor for every subject on every age. And to make this kind of like a personal comment, I've always been curious to understand quantum mechanics better because you know we have this whole new world of quantum computing and I'm trying to understand it. Now I can repeat the stories that we read. But understanding it in some depth is one of the things I've always wanted to do. Well, now I have a tutor that's infinitely patient. They can say, "Oh, here's the thing that you need to understand. These are the questions you have about what the observer effect in quantum mechanics is and here are some of the ways to think about it."

The action step is: pick one subject—English, math, coding—and create a simple AI tutor. It could be in Telegram. Share with 10 students, get feedback and improve it.

The overall advice here for any business that you want to start or any product that you want to test: start small with a very, very specific group of people. And if you're listening to all of this and thinking "with so many niches opening up, how do you actually choose the right one?" When I spoke with Aravind, the founder of Perplexity, whose company went from zero to 20 billion in just three years, he told me the one principle that matters most.

a special guest: Only thing you can bet on is whether you are so obsessed about a topic that you will do it anyway regardless of all the odds stacked against you and then you'll prove the world wrong because you go so far deep into that and no one cared about the problem more than you did. So I think build for yourself. Hopefully that's a thing that a lot of people in the world want and therefore you can turn it into a scalable product and a scalable company.

Marina Mogilko: To sum up, right now is still the perfect time to start. You don't need a research lab or billions in funding to start. You just need speed, focus, and the courage to act. The founders I've talked to—from Reid Hoffman to Aravind—all prove the same point. The biggest companies start small: a wrapper around ChatGPT, a voice tool for creators, a tool that helps one student at a time.

So don't wait for permission. Don't wait for AGI and universal basic income. Pick one idea, launch your MVP this week, and test it with real people. That's how you go from zero to opportunity while the door is still wide open.

The AI gold rush isn't coming. It is here. And the only question is: will you watch it happen or will you be part of it? And the thought that really keeps me motivated all the time is that we might only have 12 months to build our wealth. So off we go. Let's build our wealth.