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Artificial Intelligence is the new gluten-free.

It is another two-word phrase that every business now uses to capture the market’s attention and drive sales. Although the technology is indeed impressive, most 90s kids with AOL Instant Messenger spent time talking to the chatbot SmarterChild, and ChatGPT is just SmarterChild with a few dozen PhDs.

I joke, but that’s mostly because part of me is terrified. Almost weekly, a new AI model can create magic even with my poorly written prompts. For now, AI is relegated to the confines of our computers, but as it grows, it is inevitable that it will begin to affect change in our meat-based world.

This means the time is now to start looking into investments and income streams you can start building along with your new underground bunker.

“Artificial intelligence won’t replace human ingenuity—it will amplify it. The future of humanity and economics will be shaped not by machines alone, but by how wisely we integrate AI to enhance creativity, productivity, and the pursuit of a better world.”

— ChatGPT

IRL: Invest in Real Labor

The things we REALLY want AI to do, it won’t be able to do for a while.

Like cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, digging out the flower beds, and pretty much any other chore your wife asked you to do that you still haven’t done yet.

Businesses involving labor are the safest because a computer might have a bigger brain, but you have even bigger biceps.

Grass (and Money) Is Green

My first job was when I was 12 years old. Don’t worry; if you're an entrepreneur, it’s not considered child labor. At least, that’s what I learned from Shark Tank.

I spent a summer dragging a lawnmower around my block and mowing the lawns for all the old people living there. Looking back, I was undercharging at only $10 per lawn, but this was back in 2001 when $10 would have been worth $17.81 today.

I spent that entire summer mowing about six lawns weekly. At the end of the summer, I was dozens of dollars richer and spent most of it on a giant speaker and subwoofer system.

Looking back, I should have used this money to buy another mower, grab a friend, and build a landscaping empire. I don’t know about you, but in my town, the nicest houses are owned by landscapers.

Cut Down Costs

You can start a fairly small business like this and build it up as your client list grows. The majority of the initial startup costs would be:

This is enough to start you off and, with one or two staff members, you are prepared to make piles of money out of piles of leaves.

The average American home has 0.25-0.5 acres of land, so you can reasonably complete a lawn in 25-35 minutes. If you charge $200 per month per house, factoring in payroll, maintenance, fuel, and overhead, you could profit $175 per month per lawn you do. 

The Grass is Greener

Basic lawn care is just the start of this business's money-making potential. To increase profits and make your business more attractive, you can expand to offer many different services like aeration, irrigation, fertilizer, and weed control.

You can also create and install custom landscaping. AI might be able to help you conceptualize this, but it won’t be able to dig out a hole for you to plant that new cherry tree.

If you don’t feel like starting your landscaping business from the ground up (pun intended), you can buy an established business with equipment, staff, and a client base. We’ve found businesses with asking costs ranging from $200k to over $1 million with great revenue and cash flow.

It doesn’t end with landscaping; there are other businesses inside the house that you can do inside the house, where AI can never get you.

Maid of Money

Everyone hates cleaning up after themselves. Or worse - children.

Housekeeping services will never not be necessary. Although it seems like a new, dread-inducing home robot is being announced every few months, it is going to be a while before you can kick your feet up and watch the game with a pile of nachos without feeling the seething anger of your wife as she cleans the house around you.

Until then, you can hire a housekeeper or build your own army of house cleaners to clean your house AND make money off your friends and neighbors. With a crew of just three employees, you can generate six figures in yearly profit.

You can start your cleaning empire with initial startup costs ranging from an estimated $3.5k to $12k.

A three-person team charging between $150 and $250 could reasonably do 30 jobs per week. Assuming $200 a house, this would mean $6k a week in revenue, and at a standard profit margin of 40%, you could bring in nearly $125k by the end of the year.

People are slobs, might as well make money from them before they become human batteries.

Anti AI Investments

Betting against the house is fun.

AI is controlling the entire stock market. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it is a truth. Since the announcement of AI, the top tech stocks have soared and these stocks bolster our entire market. You could easily invest in NVidia or Meta and be like everyone else, but that’s not why you’re here, is it?

AI won’t replace certain sectors and industries but will definitely enhance them. These are the types of investments to make now, before AI really takes hold in most services.

Some examples would be:

Universal Healthcare

Companies involved with medical devices, biotech, and healthcare services will remain strong as AI invades our everyday lives. These services can’t necessarily be replaced entirely, but AI can help provide more and better services than what is currently available.

Axsome Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company developing therapies for central nervous system conditions. With two drugs currently available and five more in the pipeline, along with a focus on using AI to offer services to clients, the stock is doing very well in 2025.

Big Tech Energy

AI will consume an extraordinary amount of power—so much so that Microsoft just helped restart the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. We are living in a cyberpunk Godzilla movie. 

Investing in nuclear energy sounds like buying lava, but these investments have soared in 2025. One of the leading stocks in this sector is BWX Technologies (BWXT). They have been the top suppliers of all things nuclear to the US government and are expanding their manufacturing capability to meet the needs of our new AI overlords.

Realest Ate

With houses becoming an increasingly scarce and expensive commodity, buying real estate is a no-brainer investment. With home prices expected to rise by 3-4% or more depending on your market, you stand to make money whenever you sell.

Until then, you can rent it out if you are not living there.

If only there were an amazingly detailed guide to rental properties written by a cool, handsome guy. Would you look at that?! Just look at it!

Artificial Intelligence - Real Savings

Instead of fighting the many-tentacled beast of AI, or engage in futile efforts to invest against it, just give in and let it download your brain save you money.

That was awkward. Before AI starts realizing what’s going on, use it to your advantage and start having it save you money on your business now.

From finance to marketing and inventory management, these tools can help you streamline your business and create opportunities to save money.

From payroll to purchasing, AI tools that can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in direct cost or time are being created at an alarming rate.

If you’re starting a small business, you might not need to give AI access to your entire payroll with a small team of 3-5 people. Small savings in time and a bit of automation can go a long way to streamlining your business and daily responsibilities.

Some of the tools we recommend and use are:

An LMM Chatbot

A good AI chatbot can help you make almost any task take you minutes instead of hours.

From Claude, which specializes in sophisticated text and code work, to the good ol’ ChatGPT, these smarty pants bots can help you generate email marketing campaigns, generate Excel formulas, and maximize SEO.

You can even use Google’s Gemini if you hate yourself. I joke, but through Google Meet, you can automatically categorize and write meeting notes to maximize the productivity and actionability of your team.

Grammar Checkers

Once AI is finished creating your next email for your holiday sale, allow another AI to help you fix all the extra things you added to make it more personal.

We use Grammarly constantly when writing the newsletter. Just ask poor Andrew, who has to deal with my hilarious but hastily written drafts.

Customer Service

Nobody actually likes handling customer service situations. We love our customers, but our customers don’t always love us, or they need more help than we might have time to give them in a reasonable way.

Intercom is one of the best tools for automating customer outreach by providing necessary information quickly and accurately. It is used here at Lasso and aggregates the knowledge base and our backlog of previous conversations, emails, and chats. It has quickly taken over most of the customer service work.

This huge savings in payroll and mental load keeps your customer base engaged and active with your product.

Sales

This is probably the only job I’d rather automate over customer service.

You start by throwing Hail Mary passes into the void and have to quickly and expertly convert any leads you have into revenue. Reply.io can help generate leads, send out cold email campaigns, and convert website traffic directly into booked meetings.

They can even “hire” an AI SDR Agent to help close the deal by using its superior intelligence to trick any stupid human into buying your product. You can save time and money by hiring someone to do this for you and paying out commissions on these converted leads.

Money Talks

What IRL business would you create to create an AI-proof stream of revenue?

Let us know your answers so we can feature them in a future newsletter!

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Our Favorite Money Tools

🦋 Monarch - Automatically monitor spending, create budgets, and track your net worth. Categorizes transactions with AI.

💳️ Privacy.com - Virtual credit card numbers per expense. Easily control how much any card can spend and never get overcharged again. Get 1% cash back!

🥧 M1 Finance - Simple, no-fee investing with superpowers. Built from the ground up for long-term investors with high expectations. We use them; they are awesome.

🏠 Fundrise - Invest in Rust Belt and Mid-Western real estate.

🏦 Mercury - The best small business checking account, full stop. We use it for all of our businesses, including my personal checking.

🌵 Lasso - My business. We create tools that help Creators monetize their work.

See the complete list in our Toolbox.

May the cash flow always be in your favor,

Andrew and Lou - the Funny Money team