How to Actually Use AI to Make Money
Most people are using AI like Google. They ask it a question, get the most statistically likely answer, and wonder why they're not seeing transformational results in their business or career.
Here's what they're missing: AI is linguistic. It's a mirror that reflects back exactly what you put into it. Feed it garbage inputs, get garbage outputs. Feed it structured, contextual, intentional inputs, and you unlock a whole new space of possibilities.
The Real Difference
The people making money with AI (other than the ones actually building the tools) aren't asking better questions. They're having fundamentally different conversations.
While most people type "help me with marketing" and expect magic, the winners are structuring, sequencing, and architecting their interactions. They understand that AI's power isn't in its ability to retrieve information—it's in its ability to help you invent new actions and learn things that didn't exist for you before.
Input Architecture Changes Everything
Here's what I do:
Instead of starting with a blank slate, I provide the AI with context. I create company profiles by scraping my customer's website. I upload meeting transcripts. I feed it project scopes and database schemas. I give the AI the raw materials to have an intelligent conversation about my or my customer's specific situation.
Then, instead of asking one-off questions, I architect sequential dialogues. The AI doesn't just answer—it asks follow-up questions based on previous responses. It builds on context. It helps me think through problems.
I closed the biggest deal ever for our company using this approach. I created four documents: a company profile from my customer's scraped website, a project profile from meeting transcripts, a detailed scope, and a database schema. Then I gave my customer a prompt so they could have conversations with these documents directly, instead of relying on me to answer questions that are already resolved in the context files I created.
The result? The customer accepted the scope and knew exactly what they were buying and one developer I onboarded into the project said what normally takes 10+ hours of questions was resolved in one hour of prompting.
The Linguistic Advantage
This is what it means to be linguistic with these tools. You're not just extracting information—you're using AI to think alongside you, to spot what's missing in your strategy, to help you see possibilities you couldn't see before.
The difference between someone who makes money with AI and someone who doesn't isn't intelligence. It's understanding that your ability to produce outcomes with these tools is directly determined by how well you structure your inputs.
If you're frustrated with AI giving you mediocre outputs, you're probably having mediocre conversations with it. The tool is only as powerful as the context and intention you bring to it.
The New Standard
We're living in a world where Amazon deploys code every 11.7 seconds. While you might not need that level of speed, you do need to be inventing marginal utilities that help your networks—customers, employees, colleagues—produce their ambitions.
AI gives you the ability to cure your ignorance quickly and invent solutions in domains where you have no expertise. But only if you know how to have the right type of conversation with it.
The people making money with AI understand this. They're not using it as a search engine. They're using it as a thinking partner to architect solutions that didn't exist before.
The question isn't whether AI will change how business gets done. It's whether you'll learn to speak its language before your competition does.