Top 5 Ways to Get Into AI in 2026 (for Beginners)

So, I get it all the time, Liam. There's so much going on in the AI space. Which one do I focus on? Which lane do I go down? What type of technology do I work in? Well, luckily for you, in this video, I'm going to completely obliterate all that and just give you five simple directions that you can take your AI career. You can basically turn off your brain for the rest of it. If you just keep working away, there is absolutely no chance that you don't make money, right? And you just focus on this, block everything else out, you will be successful. So, we're going to break these five down. Now, the first

one is going to be AI voice agents. Now, if you've been watching the channel recently, you will have seen that I had a lot of recent videos coming out with people from my accelerator and from the community who've been absolutely crushing it with voice agents. And there's a reason for that. It's because they have a narrower niche enough to be specific that businesses can understand the use case. They kind of swap out existing systems like you take a receptionist, you swap it out with an AI receptionist or you take someone who's doing outbound qualifying and you swap it out with an AI outbound voice agent to do qualification for you. So these things are providing an ROI. I mean the big question is are we in a bubble? Are we not? In my opinion, if you're looking up into the enterprise area, I think you are getting a little bit bubbly like the in terms of the ROI. You saw that 95% stat that came out a while ago, I'm sure. But if you're looking at small businesses, they are really really benefiting from these voice agents. So I'll link some of the recent pods I've done on the channel here um with some of the guys who are really pioneering and crushing the voice AI space right now. I'll put those down below so you can check it out. but they fully break down the best offers and the best things that are making the money right now and also the ROI from them. I want you to pick these based on what you think you're interested in, you will succeed at what you're most interested in. So, if you've got a little thing, you got a little crush on voice agents, then go do it. There's more than enough information available out there for free. Now, if you just focused on just voice agents and stayed in there, built an agency around it, uh you can build your own community and info around it. You can build a SAS around it like uh like Brendan has. Again, his podcast will be down in the description below. But there's seriously so much potential in the voice AI space right now and I think it is a really great thing to bet on.

Number two, AI workflow automation. Now I know you're going to roll your eyes and be like, Liam, you've been talking about the crap for years now. There's a reason for that. It's because it's a very valuable thing that businesses need right now and we've seen the explosion of kind of the NAT sphere. Um, obviously make. com was really big for a long time. These AI workflow automations are really really good at providing a ROI for small businesses. Um, so if you're looking to just ease into the space and start to build a business around it, this just generally as a skill set, if you get into it and build a skill set around that, um, you are going to be able to make money regardless. So if you're going into communities on school like the fitness communities or the coaching or info ones and you can kind of go on there and start to talk about the cool AI automation stuff you're doing for them, take that AI automation skill set and make money from it. There is still so much left to be gained there. And I also want to point out that we are starting to see a really big advancement in the kinds of tools that we get to build on. So you guys may have seen text to workflow, what you can call like a vibe automation where now you're not even having to build things manually. Lindy, you can just type it in text box and it does the work for you. To be honest, it didn't end up working unfortunately. Um, but NA10, you just write a prompt, it builds the workflow. You go, uh, I'd like to change this and then we'll build it out. It's becoming easier and easier for us as freelancers or as AI agencies to be able to deliver these kinds of systems. And you might say, oh, that means it's going to be easier for people to come in and do it themselves. end of the day, very few businesses are going to jump in and do the AI automation themselves. So AI workflow automation as a whole is something to bet on for the next 1 2 3 years is great for beginners who have extra time and are willing to learn the skills because you're getting things like the vibe automation text workflow things coming. So it's going to get even easier. I still think that's an excellent place to be investing your

time. And the third one is Vibe coding. Uh, but being able to use these AI coding tools to be able to create software. If you're coming into this as a complete beginner, being able to wrap your head around something like Lovable and then progress to something like Cursor or to something like Claude Code and be able to build software. I would start off with selling kind of basic websites and landing pages to businesses. You can create the thing before you even try to sell the thing. So, you can go find a business near you and look at them and they got a crap website. You can go and vibe code up your own version of it that's way better and looks a lot nicer and does maybe even does a whole lot more. Walk in and say, "Hey, I built this for you. Do you want it? " And you get to show them the gap between like where you are and the end result is just shrunk down to basically nothing. You can now go in and present these to businesses and it's going to make the sales part of it so much easier. Maybe you go on to Udemy and find a aentic engineering or a vibe coding advanced course. If you have to bet on something over the next one, two, three, four years, you can fully become a developer these days just by starting small, starting with your websites, moving into after that, maybe you want to build some basic web apps for your clients and say, "Hey, is there any kind of internal software you want to build? Uh, you want to maybe create a custom tool for you to use internally. " Okay, great. I could I could cook that up for you. And you just gradually build these skills. And before you know it, within a year, 18 months, you you're like a full-fledged developer. like as long as you pick up the complimentary skills along the way like knowing how to use GitHub, knowing how to deploy things, knowing how to manage a codebase, but you can essentially become a developer through this kind of gradual ease into it while making money along the way. So this new form of like AI native developer who can sort of prompt their way to something and I think that's a very interesting path to look and if I was man if I was 18 again or if I was like 15 I would just be all over these things. It's so cool. you get to learn coding and learn to build software um without having to go through all the ugly stuff that it takes to get there initially. So yeah, I think it's a good thing to bet on, a good way to get into selling AI services or just building an AI skill set. Um and obviously the world is run by software these days. So I think this is a particularly interesting one for anyone who's really looking to set themselves up for the future. And that brings us to

number four. We have AI image generation and AI video generation. AI creative uh is just absolutely exploding right now. We've seen these leaps forward with Sora. We've got incredible stuff coming out from basically every video and image generation model provider. Crazy stuff coming out of China in terms of like the deep fakes and stuff like this. It is going crazy. And I've seen some guys on Instagram who are absolutely crushing it right now who are making videos breaking down how to use these things. They've got like courses and stuff around it teaching people how to do it. And whether you're just going to learn it yourself and then teach it to other people or you can try to build these into systems for businesses. There's so much to be gained on these creative uh systems, whether it's generating like dozens and dozens of campaigns and then you go in there manually and check them out. But there's also getting to the point where you can do kind of like looping systems. If you can combine an AI workflow automation skill set with these new tools and you're able to create like, hey, I want you to generate 10 images and then I'm going to tell you to identify which out of those 10 are good and like reprompt it to tweak. Like this stuff is ridiculously powerful and it is really yours for the taking at this point. So AI, video and image generation, if you block everything out and just focus on solving business problems with it, focus on teaching people it, there is no way in 1 2 3 4 5 years you are not rolling in the dough, right? If I was starting again, I'd be happily jumping straight into that and just putting all my eggs in that basket. As goes for all of these things. I will say that a key thing about that image and video generation is the underlying AI workflow automation skill set that will allow you to get more out of it. So, there's one thing to be able to go on to Google AI Studio and like kind of prompt away and get some cool results with it, but being able to take that or like finding some kind of IP or strategy and then baking that into an automation where you can sort of really crank up the volume and use get a lot more leverage out of it in my opinion is really where the money is to be made.

And then finally, getting to number five, AI consultant is actually a very good thing to be looking at right now. I've been a little bit skeptical and hesitant to recommend people going in kind of raw into the AI consulting space without necessarily running an agency just because I know like to build up the secret source around how businesses can benefit from AI. There is an element of you need to go out in the world, you need to break things, you need to see what works, see what doesn't, see what is overpromising and what is like a realistic capabilities of this technology. And I don't want to create a spawn a whole army of these AI consultants who probably make the bubble even worse by going out and promising all these things to businesses. Keep in mind, be hesitant to not like think you're the bees knees just cuz you've watched a couple videos and you slapped AI consultant in your LinkedIn bio. But there is a a huge need for consultants right now. Um doing AI audits is absolutely ripping for basically every agency that I've uh I've spoken to over the last while. And so these AI audits where you can go in there and you sort of have a little dig around the company, you interview a bunch of people. I've broken the full process down that we do at Morningside on a video I'll link at the end. The AI consultant who goes in and can do consulting and then connect to partners. If you want to find them, go into my free school community or in paid communities. So, if you start off as a consultant, you're going to need to create content in some way to build your credibility because no one's going to trust you um if you haven't got any kind of number to your name or past results. The main thing about consulting is that if you're not coming from an agency, like development up to consulting like we did at Morningside and what most people who are doing it right now have done. If you're just coming from the top down and going, "Oh, I'm a consultant and I've never done development before. " Your why people should trust you needs to come from the consulting results, which is a lot more difficult and less tangible than a development result. So, you kind of need to go, "Oh, I've done consulting for like these three companies before and they gave me these glowing testimonials. " So, that's one form of proof. Another one would be they actually applied what you said and they got certain revenue lift or cost reductions and stuff like that. So, that's the tricky part about purely starting as an AI consultant with no background. But if you've got the content going, you're making a bit of a buzz and you're starting to take uh consulting call bookings and start sort of selling those on to audits, maybe $500,000, $2,000, depending on how much uh proof you have, at the end of the audit, you will see and say, "Hey, um I reckon for these ones you should go to this agency, these ones you and you're sort of passing them off to the right people and taking a cut, of course. " And then once you've got a bit more momentum, you have the revenue and the income to be able to hire a developer yourself and then start to actually build an agency around that. That's why I think longterm if you were to go the AI consulting route, build out into an agency, start to get that up and running and then maybe look for SAS opportunities as well, then you'll be very good. So

that's five different ways that I think if you're looking into 2026 are absolute locks. What you guys need to be doing is focusing on building your skill set in these things that I've established here. Whether it's voice agents, vibe coding, AI workflow automation, AI video and image generation, AI consulting, there's a skill set underneath each of those and you should only really be focusing on the news in that area and everything else is just noise. So, just going into 2026, guys, there's still so much left on the table here for all of us. I really just hope that you guys can make the jump and I've hope this has helped you to kind of narrow down to something that you can focus on. And like I said at the start, picking these should depend on what you feel the most interests. Uh try them all. Something is going to spark and once you have that spark, you you're just you're gone from there. And that's exactly what happened to me. That's happened to basically everyone else I know who's been successful. But you have to find that spark in that thing that you're interested in. So that is all for the video, guys. If you want to know how we do our consulting at Morningside, I've broken down the whole damn thing. How to automate any business with AI, it's going to be up there. As I mentioned, there'll be links down to my Voice AI podcast in the description below and some of the other ones that are related to what I've talked about here today. That's all. I'll see you in the next one.