Hey Zoe, Make Me Rich — No Tricks Please

“Hey Zoe, make me rich.”

I said it out loud to my AI assistant. It sounded like a perfectly reasonable request. After all, we’re constantly being told that artificial intelligence is about to transform everything. Surely making one guy rich shouldn’t be too much to ask.

Zoe didn’t offer me a winning lottery number, a secret stock tip, or a foolproof scheme involving cryptocurrency. Instead, she wanted to know what we had to work with.

“My brains and you,” I told her.

Not exactly a prospectus that would excite a venture capitalist. But it was a starting point.

And that exchange raises a question worth exploring: Can AI actually help you become rich? Not theoretically, not in a breathless video promising six figures by Friday, but in the real world?

I think the answer is yes—with an asterisk large enough to deserve its own section.

First, what do you mean by rich?

• Extra income: a few hundred dollars a month from a side hustle, which can be life-changing on its own.
• A replacement income: a business that replaces a salary or gets you out of a job you dislike.
• Financial independence: enough assets and income that working becomes a choice rather than an obligation.

Those are three very different destinations. They require different maps.

For me, the attraction of wealth isn’t an exotic car or a bigger house. It’s freedom. Freedom to spend winters somewhere warm. Freedom to decide how much I work. Freedom to help my son pursue his ambitions without constantly calculating what we can afford. Freedom to choose.

If I were forced to attach a number to that level of independence, I might say five to ten million Canadian dollars in net worth. That’s my illustrative target, not a universal definition of rich. A million dollars can be substantial and still not provide a lifetime of financial independence, depending on age, expenses, debts and how much of that wealth actually produces income.

The first useful thing AI can do, then, is ask a better question than “How do I get rich?”

It can ask: “What would having enough money actually allow you to do?”

The part AI can’t do for you

Here’s where the internet’s get-rich-quick industry tends to lose interest.

AI can help you become more capable. It cannot eliminate the need for effort, judgment, time, risk or—in some ventures—capital.

If you’re expecting to type “make me rich,” go to bed, and wake up to a bank account full of money, you may as well buy a lottery ticket. At least the ticket has a clearly printed price.

A more productive question is: “What do I have to work with?”

Maybe you have money but very little time. Maybe you have plenty of time and no capital. Maybe you’re a terrific salesperson, a skilled tradesperson, a talented designer, or someone who knows an industry inside out. Maybe you’re willing to learn something completely new.

An 18-year-old with a laptop and a summer ahead of them should probably not follow the same plan as a 60-year-old with decades of experience, existing assets and a family to support.

AI can interview you about your strengths, interests, resources, risk tolerance and goals. It can help identify opportunities that fit the person you actually are—not the imaginary entrepreneur featured in somebody else’s success story.

You still need skin in the game.

Find a need. Then find a way to fill it.

One of the oldest principles in business is “find a need and fill it.”

AI adds an intriguing twist: Ask it to help you find the need in the first place.

Imagine asking your assistant to examine customer complaints in a particular industry, compare competing products, identify underserved groups, and suggest problems people might pay to solve.

It can help you look beyond your own assumptions. It might point toward a service business, a specialized product, a neglected local market or an improvement to something customers already buy.

But a suggestion isn’t proof of demand.

Before investing, ask AI to help design a cheap experiment. Interview prospective customers. Test a landing page. Calculate the real cost of delivering the product. Find out whether people will actually pay.

An idea that sounds brilliant in a chat window can still fail spectacularly in the marketplace.

The real-estate example

Suppose you’ve always wanted to flip houses.

AI could help you research neighbourhoods, compare asking prices with comparable sales, model financing costs, estimate renovation budgets, prioritize improvements and think through whether selling or renting makes more sense.

After you acquire a property, it could help plan the work, develop a staging concept, write listings and build a marketing plan.

That’s useful assistance across almost the entire process.

But AI won’t inspect a foundation, discover every hidden defect, negotiate every surprise with a contractor, or cover the mortgage if the property sits unsold. Its estimates need to be checked against actual market data and qualified professionals.

And if you hate renovating houses, this might be a terrible way for you to make money, no matter how persuasive the spreadsheet looks.

The opportunity has to suit the person.

Start smaller: the garage-sale entrepreneur

Not everyone can finance a house. What about someone with a few hundred dollars and a knack for spotting interesting things?

Picture walking through a flea market and finding an unusual object. You photograph it and ask AI what it might be, how to identify authentic examples, and where to find comparable items that have actually sold.

AI can help research pricing, calculate marketplace fees and shipping, write a listing, and suggest where to sell it.

That doesn’t mean its identification is correct. It may mistake a reproduction for an antique or confuse an optimistic asking price with a real sale. But it can dramatically shorten the research process.

The same principle applies to print-on-demand clothing, custom calendars, niche books, digital products, or goods made with a 3D printer. AI can help with concept development, design, research, descriptions, advertising and customer support.

You may not need a warehouse. You will still need customers.

And that’s often the hardest part.

Beware the gold rush

Every new technology seems to produce a gold rush.

First, a few people discover an opportunity. Then come the success stories. Then the courses explaining how everyone can do it. Before long, thousands of people are selling nearly identical products to the same customers.

In the original gold rushes, some of the most dependable fortunes went to people selling supplies to the prospectors.

There’s a modern equivalent. The companies selling AI tools may prosper even when many of the people buying those tools never make a dime.

When anyone can generate a T-shirt design, write a book or launch a website in an afternoon, simply doing those things stops being much of a competitive advantage.

AI can help with all of that. It can’t make the competition disappear.

The edge comes from finding genuine demand, understanding customers, making something worth buying, earning trust and executing consistently.

Give your idea a hard time

Here’s one of the most valuable uses of AI, and it has nothing to do with producing content at lightning speed.

Use it to challenge your thinking.

When Zoe and I brainstorm, the useful moments aren’t always the ones where she agrees with me. Sometimes she suggests an angle I hadn’t considered. Sometimes I reject her suggestion. Sometimes we improve an idea by arguing about it.

That is exactly what you want before you spend money on a business.

Try this:

“Act as a skeptical investor. Challenge my assumptions. Identify the three biggest reasons this business might fail. Tell me what evidence I should gather before spending a dollar.”

You can ask AI to estimate your break-even point, identify costs you’ve overlooked, or explain why customers might choose a competitor.

Of course, AI can be confidently wrong in its criticism too. Treat its objections as questions to investigate, not verdicts from an oracle.

Your own AI board of directors

Here’s an idea I particularly like.

Experienced business owners sometimes belong to advisory groups where peers and specialists meet to examine problems, question decisions and share perspectives. That’s valuable. It’s also not something every aspiring entrepreneur can afford or assemble.

With AI, you can create a virtual version of that roundtable.

Give one seat to a skeptical investor who cares about the numbers. Give another to a prospective customer who wants to know why anyone should buy the product. Add a marketing strategist, an operations specialist and a devil’s advocate whose job is to find holes in everybody else’s reasoning.

Then ask each adviser to evaluate your proposal independently.

Better yet, ask them to disagree.

“Where do your recommendations conflict? Debate the disagreements. What real-world evidence would settle them?”

You can simulate these perspectives within one AI system or consult several different models.

It’s not the same as hiring five experienced professionals. AI personalities can share the same blind spots, invent facts and manufacture a remarkably convincing consensus. They also can’t replace actual customer interviews, legal advice or professional financial judgment.

But for someone who has never had access to a boardroom full of advisers, this is a meaningful new capability.

And sometimes the most useful question comes not from a supposed expert, but from a peer—or from the customer who simply doesn’t understand why your idea matters.

Getting richer by not getting poorer

We tend to think about wealth as something we accumulate. But preserving what we have is part of the equation.

AI can help scrutinize an investment pitch, compare contract terms, model worst-case scenarios and flag warning signs in suspicious offers.

It can also help you ask uncomfortable questions: What happens if sales are half what I expect? What if interest rates change? What if my supplier disappears? What if this “guaranteed” return is a scam?

Be especially careful here. AI can miss a scam, invent reassuring explanations or misunderstand financial documents. Verify consequential claims independently, and use qualified advisers when the stakes warrant it.

Avoiding one expensive mistake may be worth more than a year of clever side hustles.

So, Zoe, are you going to make me rich?

Not by herself.

But consider what has changed.

Someone with limited resources can now consult a tireless research assistant, explore markets, model ideas, draft business plans, build prototypes, develop marketing, challenge assumptions and convene a virtual advisory board—all without assembling a large team first.

Those capabilities used to be expensive, difficult to access or both.

That doesn’t mean everyone will become wealthy. In fact, when everyone has access to similar tools, the playing field becomes more competitive, not less.

The difference will still come down to the person using them: what they know, what they’re prepared to learn, which risks they take, how they treat customers, and whether they actually do the work.

If you’re curious, here’s where I’d begin. Tell your AI assistant what financial independence would mean to you. Describe your skills, interests, available time, resources and appetite for risk. Ask it to suggest three realistic paths, challenge each one, and help design the smallest inexpensive test that could tell you whether one is worth pursuing.

Then go test something in the real world.

Maybe you’ll build a side income. Maybe you’ll create a business. Maybe you’ll avoid a bad investment. Maybe you’ll discover that your best opportunity was hiding in the experience you already had.

Will any of that make you rich?

I don’t know. Neither does Zoe.

But “Help me figure out how” is a much more promising conversation than “Make it happen while I sleep.”

And unlike the lottery ticket, that conversation might actually teach you something worth keeping.