Recently, Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., the president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), was a guest on the “Today” show to discuss the efficacy of side hustle strategies.
Side hustles, in Taylor’s view, are an increasing necessity in the modern era, as they allow you to explore (and capitalize upon) your interests outside of your day job, help you develop new skills and — most important during times of economic uncertainty — help you to earn more money.
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A significant downside to side hustles? As Taylor noted, burnout becomes a major issue: “This idea that ‘my day may be eight to 10 hours, and then I’ve got to do another gig afterwards?’ That can burn you out, absolutely.”
Helping eradicate that burnout, Taylor went on to say, is one of the major benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into your side gig.
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AI Reduces Time and Effort
“Obviously, [AI] can help you because of efficiency,” Taylor stated. “It doesn’t take you three hours to do that piece of creative genius that you’re going to create for your side client, you just do it much more quickly.”
AI can shoulder a massive amount of workload that would have otherwise taken a human worker much longer to produce. Cutting down on your workload (while increasing your output) allows you to generate more income while also freeing you up for rest, relaxation or pursuing other moneymaking avenues.
As GOBankingRates has pointed out, the time reduction and efficiency of AI can allow users to make a relatively easy extra $1,000 on the side over the course of one week in the fields of AI prompt writing, AI prompt engineering, AI tutoring and AI content writing.
An extra $1,000 per week adds up — that’s just over $50,000 per year, if you stick with it.
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Developing New Skills and Streamlining Workflows
“[AI] can help you with skills that you can bring back to your full-time gig, as well,” Taylor asserted. “There’s so much information you get from AI.”
Working directly with AI can help users learn to develop content creation, data analysis and even customer service skills, with a useful artificial intelligence platform digesting large swaths of information on the internet and presenting it to the user in digestible, easy-to-use workflows. AI in many ways can serve as a free skills tutor for the user, allowing you to do more, and thus make more money.
For instance, Forbes recently reported that developing a thorough understanding of AI can lend itself to massive profit margins. Given that AI is projected to be an essential business workflow in the years to come, knowledgeable AI consultants can expect to make between $8,000 to a whopping $175,000 per project.
Potential Downsides of AI
That said, Taylor also warned that AI can have a negative impact on the side hustle market if overused. For example, AI itself can become your workplace competition — if employers feel that they can utilize AI instead of a human employee, you and others may suddenly find yourself expendable. Further the increased usage of AI can also drive down salaries and prices as it takes over more and more jobs.
Finally, there are ethical questions — still being explored in these early days of the AI boom — regarding whether or not the work is truly “yours” if AI helped you develop and author it. Let’s say you use a series of prompts to teach an AI to design a company’s logo for your graphic design side gig. Was the AI merely a tool, or paintbrush? Or was it the painter itself?
The Bottom Line
As with any tool, AI has its pros and its cons. It can be an extraordinarily beneficial way to increase your side hustle productivity (and profits) anywhere from $1,000 a week to $175,000 per gig; however, saturating the market with AI work can also lower salaries, eliminate human positions and raise a number of difficult questions. This is still something of a “wild west” era for the technology and its applications, which may be all the more reason to capitalize on it for your side hustle while you can.
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: 2 Ways Using AI Can Help You Make Up to $100,000 More With Your Side Gig
