Top 20 Profitable AI Business Ideas in 2025

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If you still haven’t tried your hands at ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or the latest Notebook LM, we invite you out from under the rock. Just kidding, but…not really.
Over the last couple of years, artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the business world, reshaping how companies operate, make decisions, and deliver value.
The proliferation of AI is no passing fad. McKinsey estimates that AI could add up to $13 trillion to the global economy by 2030. If you’d like a piece of that pie, here are 20 examples of profitable AI business ideas to inspire your next venture.
Most users of generative AI think of it as a ‘content generation’ tool. While that is the most popular use case, it is not the only one. AI has been making great strides across industries, including music and entertainment, healthcare, pharma, manufacturing, software development, and more.
Here is a cross-section of artificial intelligence business ideas to spark your interest, irrespective of whichever industry you’re in.
Personalization is one of the most effective tasks that AI can perform. It can study trends, understand input, and personalize output at scale. The first AI business example leverages this capability.
AI-powered fitness and nutrition apps tailor health and wellness practices for every user based on their age, gender, activity level, health goals, and dietary preferences. Such apps can:
Unlike traditional fitness apps, AI-powered ones can adapt to changes in the user’s needs/lifestyle. For instance, if the user has reached their goal weight, the app can automatically change workouts to maintain their current state.
Business Tip: As a business, personalized fitness and nutrition plans follow business-to-consumer (B2C) subscription models. You can choose from ad-supported, freemium, or tiered subscription models to make this app profitable.
Typically, automation is rule-based, i.e., they follow an if-this-then-that model. AI changes the game entirely. AI enables teams to automate complex processes with multiple triggers/reactions.
This kind of automation is great for large-scale inventory management in warehouses and supply chain organizations. A robust AI-based inventory management tool can:
Business Tip: This is a B2B app typically billed as long-term contracts. While pay-as-you-go subscription models are possible here, creating multi-year engagements might be most profitable.
AI enhances the impact of the Internet of Things (IoT). AI-driven predictive maintenance solutions use sensors and devices to monitor industrial equipment. Based on the collected data, the AI-based predictive maintenance app forecasts when a machine is likely to fail.
This allows companies to perform maintenance tasks before breakdowns occur, preventing costly downtime and repairs. It is particularly profitable for industries like manufacturing, aviation, and energy, where the cost of equipment failure can run into the millions.
Business Tip: A predictive maintenance app involves more than just software. It needs an array of networked sensors, which can be a significant upfront investment. This B2B product is best established as a long-term hardware + software solution.
There are all kinds of learners — visual learners, listeners, readers, doers, and so on. A good learning system is one that adapts to the unique needs of the user without the need to create dozens of different lesson plans.
AI-powered tools can achieve exactly that. They can provide customized educational experiences by analyzing how students learn. For instance, AI courses can offer images and graphs to visual learners, while providing mnemonics to textual learners. It can also recommend supplementary materials tailored to students’ needs, making learning more engaging and efficient.
If you’re looking to build adaptive learning systems with AI, here are some popular learning needs.
Business Tip: Learning systems can be B2C through subscriptions. You can also build it on a B2B model, selling learning and development programs for corporations.
Smart home management is one of the fastest-growing sectors in AI. Biggies like Google Nest and Samsung Smart Things are building solutions to manage everything from temperature control to lighting and security.
Some of the most attractive use cases in home management are:
Typically, smart home apps are sold through the device manufacturer.
For instance, if Samsung or Xiaomi manufacture refrigerators or robotic vacuum cleaners, they also provide a mobile app to control them.
Business Tip: If you’re building an AI-based home management system, you’d do well to partner with device manufacturers or implementation companies to bundle your products with them.
Financial advisory is also an educational endeavor. Advisors are responsible for ensuring that customers understand the terms, conditions, risks, and rewards of their investment decisions. The depth of these conversations makes it difficult to scale.
AI-driven financial advisory can change that. AI’s ability to quickly process vast amounts of financial data makes it ideal for predicting market trends, managing risk, and identifying investment opportunities.
For investors, AI can offer personalized investment advice at a fraction of the cost of traditional advisors. For advisors, it can automate and operationalize a multitude of customer relationships without additional effort.
Business Tip: As an app maker, you can charge a subscription fee to both types of users, leveraging a marketplace model.
Today, much of healthcare services are reactive, i.e., patients reach out to physicians when they feel pain or illness. However, the entire industry—and the aging population—is considering moving toward a proactive approach with value-based healthcare offerings.
This move relies heavily on data, predictions, and automations. Your AI-powered healthcare diagnostics apps can ride this wave profitably by:
Business Tip: As part of a heavily regulated industry, you’ll want to pull out all the stops when it comes to compliance. Consider partnering with reputable insurers to roll out your diagnostics services.
In the first half of 2024, £570 million (equivalent of $740 million) was lost to payment fraud in the UK. Last year, US customers lost $10 billion to fraud. As malicious actors design ever-evolving scams to dupe banks and customers, every banking leader is looking at AI for help.
An enterprise-ready fraud detection and prevention app can:
Business Tip: As AI-driven fraud detection systems adapt over time, learning new techniques that fraudsters might use makes them more effective than traditional rule-based systems.
In the world of digital marketing, content is everything. AI-powered tools can truly elevate what you can do with content.
Business Tip: Content creation tools that use AI have numerous options for business models. For instance, if you’re creating a plagiarism checker, you can charge by the number of words you’re checking.
If you’re repurposing content, it would make sense to charge a flat subscription fee. Personalization tools can be integrated into devices or media apps and sold together. With content, the opportunities are truly endless.
Optimizing personal and team productivity is one of the biggest challenges for every business leader. Especially in knowledge work, where it is near impossible to define productivity unambiguously, any tool that improves performance is a boon for organizations.
AI project management: An integrated AI tool like ClickUp Brain within a project management software for startups can help you:

AI calendar management: Meetings are a necessary evil for knowledge workers. AI can help tame this by personalizing schedules based on preferences, patterns, and priorities.
AI Copilots: Generative AI has led to the rise of AI agents across functions. You can build your Copilot for writers, editors, developers, operations leaders, salespeople, finance professionals, etc.
Business Tip: You can make these tools B2C, selling to individuals. You can also build them as a collaborative product, charging per-user subscriptions to AI tools for startups and enterprise teams.
Modern work is complex. With quiet quitting, gig economy, hybrid workforce, and other transformative working models, talent acquisition is in chaos. AI tools can help manage that chaos better toward meaningful outcomes.
AI-based apps for any of the following use cases can be a profitable business idea.
Business Tip: You can build any of these apps for enterprise customers or their recruitment partners. For enterprise talent acquisition teams, these apps can integrate into the organizational workflow to elevate process effectiveness. For recruiting agencies, these apps can create extraordinary efficiencies at scale.
For both customers, these apps can work on a monthly/yearly subscription model. It would also be meaningful to have usage-based pricing. For example, you can charge for every resume screened or every employee onboarded.
Everyone uses a virtual assistant, be it asking Siri to set an alarm or using a personal finance app to create expense reports. Virtual assistants and agents are great AI-based business ideas for startups to build products of exponential value.
Below are some of the apps you can build into a profitable business.
Personal assistants: Automation workflows connecting to different apps for users to perform personal tasks like sending an email, paying a bill, ordering groceries, or booking appointments.
Customer support assistants: AI chatbots play the role of customer service agents to help users find information, resolve simple issues, raise tickets, etc.
Expert assistants: AI tools with specialized intelligence in areas such as the stock market, weather, travel booking, research, etc.
Executive assistants: AI tools that help business leaders schedule meetings, process emails, summarize documents, plan follow-ups, etc.
Business Tip: Depending on the nature of your virtual assistant, you can charge subscriptions. For instance, expert assistants can charge a higher subscription for their in-depth knowledge, while executive assistants can reach a wider audience base at a lower price point.
Digital marketing is all about intent and relevance. AI-based advertising software can optimize that by delivering highly targeted advertisements, product recommendations, and marketing messages.
Business Tip: In addition to building AI products, you also have the opportunity to become a niche AI marketing technology agency for specific clients. You can create custom AI marketing solutions for their needs. For example, you might create a bot to track specific keyword performance or report on market developments, building products that offer a competitive advantage.
An organization’s ability to reach more customers and build more awareness/interest directly correlates to how much revenue they can make. In highly competitive market scenarios, sales teams are looking for ways to reduce costs without compromising performance. AI-based products can enable exactly that.
Below are the products you can build to help various marketing and sales use cases.
How can AI be used in marketing and sales?
Automate tasks: Build an AI-based automation app to reduce the number of repetitive tasks that sales reps need to perform.
For instance, follow-ups can entirely be automated with AI, with customization and predictive messaging to boot.
Transcribe videos: AI note-takers are in high demand among sales professionals, who use the tool to record/transcribe the conversation while they focus on building a meaningful relationship with the prospect.

Design next steps: Based on the conversation, AI tools can automatically create action items for both parties. In fact, the ability to integrate the AI tool into apps like CRM, email, video conferencing, demo platforms, etc., can automate even complex workflows.
Create dashboards: Most sales tools today offer some kind of reporting. However, the standard out-of-the-box reports are often not enough. AI can help teams create customized, KPI-driven dashboards with only the most important information at any given time.
What’s more, you can also build an AI chatbot that responds with numbers. “What’s the total sales so far?” or “How many leads have stayed dormant for over 30 days?” enabling teams to dynamically explore their sales data without disturbing a data analyst!

Business Tip: It is important to understand that sales is a highly competitive space. Big CRM platforms already dominate the market. So, as a business, it makes more sense to build niche AI products.
Alternatively, you can build apps for features that these CRM platforms lack. This way, you can host these apps on the Salesforce or HubSpot marketplace and charge a usage-based fee.
Read More: If any of the above interests you, here’s more on how to use AI in sales.
Over a decade ago, investor Marc Andreessen quipped that software is eating the world. Since then, we’ve only been surrounded by more and more software, helping us do everything from paying bills to playing games every single day.
AI is taking the development of such software one giant leap forward. You can build simple yet powerful products for any of the software engineering problems organizations face today. Some ideas below.
From software project management to deployment, there are dozens of engineering use cases that can be enhanced with AI. If you’re in this industry, you might find our blog post on how to use AI in software development interesting.
Business Tip: There are already several tools that software teams use. For instance, Jira for ticketing, Github for code management, etc. are used by millions of developers worldwide. While building an AI-based software development business, it helps to carefully identify gaps in these common products and solve them thoughtfully.
In the early stages of AI adoption, you might want to use some of ClickUp’s development plan templates to guide your journey.
One of the biggest challenges in e-commerce is returns. Customers buy products to try them on and return those that don’t fit. What’s worse is that products like makeup that can’t be returned—even if they are unsuitable—create buyer’s remorse.
AI-powered fashion apps aim to solve precisely this problem. Here are some ideas for apps you can build.
Business Tip: With all this data in hand, your AI product can also predict future fashion trends, helping retailers stay ahead of the competition. Just ensure you receive user consent before leveraging it.
Real estate isn’t the most enthusiastic industry when it comes to technology adoption. However, a compelling product can just be the push they need. AI technology offers immense opportunities in this greenfield industry.
Property valuation: AI techniques can make more accurate valuations on property based on historical data, market trends, and other factors, such as neighborhood growth or interest rates.
Tenant services: AI-powered property management tools can automate tenant services, such as rent collection and maintenance requests.
Facility management: AI tools can help property managers schedule upcoming maintenance, predict downtimes/repairs, evaluate repair-or-replace decisions, etc.
Collaboration: AI-powered collaboration tools like ClickUp for real estate can help dramatically improve outcomes. For instance, with ClickUp’s location tools, you can map out listings, use color coding to differentiate listings by price range, and easily save information for later.

Business Tip: As a cautious, relatively slow-moving industry, real estate customers might not rush to buy AI tools. So, a freemium model would help demonstrate value and then build trust through the customer journey.
AI has the potential to play a defining role in modernizing agriculture. AI-powered systems can analyze data from soil sensors, weather forecasts, and satellite imagery to optimize farming across various fronts.
Some key AI use cases are:
Business Tip: As an AI product, you have the option to charge a subscription fee to consumers/farmers directly. However, in this market, you can also design a B2B model by partnering with NGOs or community organizations for revenue-sharing models.
Travel companies and hospitality platforms like Airbnb and TripAdvisor have long been leveraging AI to create customized travel experiences for users. However, there is a lot more to be done in this space.
Some problems that still remain unsolved are:
Business Tip: Given that the travel industry is a crowded space, the best bet is to build enhancements and sell to various organizations. For instance, you might build a custom automation solution for a hotel chain that integrates with their ERP.
“A typical Fortune 1000 company maintains 20,000-40,000 active contracts at any given point of time,” finds a study by World Commerce and Contracting. Knowing the clauses, dates, and details of these contracts can be an exhausting manual task.
With AI, that changes. AI is delivering exponential value by automating:
Business Tip: Both user-based and usage-based pricing work in this market. For instance, in the case of legal research apps, you can charge a subscription fee per user. For document review apps, you might charge for each document/page process.
If none of these strike your fancy, we have a 21st idea—a little meta but completely worthwhile: Ask an AI. 😊
Spin up an AI tool like ClickUp Brain and exchange ideas with it. If you’re having starting trouble, ask ClickUp Brain to suggest ideas and refine them.
AI startup is a vast landscape of businesses. Across model creation, platforms, B2C, B2B, and service offerings, the world is your oyster. While evaluating ideas for your startup, consider the nature, market value, and competitiveness of every existing player in this space.
To get you started, here are some examples of businesses creating a place for themselves today.
In the generative AI space, model development companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are among the most valuable startups today. In data analytics with AI, Databricks stands out. Healthcare startup Abridge is growing in popularity among the clinicians’ community.
In productivity and collaboration, Notion and ClickUp are making huge strides. In content creation, Writer is growing popular.
It is important to note that all of these are growing startups which haven’t yet reached the stage of profitability. However, the path toward success for AI in business is indeed clear.
Once you have an idea to explore, here’s how you can begin developing your tool.
Building an AI tool is a comprehensive endeavor involving business, technology, and consumer-side considerations. Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough of how you can go about yours.
Before you begin developing your tool, clarify your idea.
Once you have crystallized your idea, conduct market research to know where you stand. Ask the following questions.
For example, if you’re building an AI-based social media management tool, you’re relying heavily on X (formerly Twitter)’s API to perform the task. If X withdraws support, your business model will collapse.
Understand these parameters before you venture into building your AI tool.
Identify the one significant value that your AI-based product is delivering to the customer. This would answer your question, “What are the benefits of AI?”
The answer could be improving efficiency, enhancing productivity, saving operational costs, automating customer service, providing real-time analytics, etc.
While defining your objectives, make them SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Ensure that your product consistently meets these objectives for your customers over time.
This step is the cornerstone of AI development. An AI model’s performance is directly tied to the quantity and quality of the data it is trained on. Inaccurate, complete, or poorly structured data can lead to failed AI tools.
Once you prepare the data, develop the AI models using machine learning or deep learning algorithms. At the basic level, you would be:
Also Read: Here’s a primer on how to integrate AI into a website.
Once you’ve built the tool, it’s time to take it to the market. Marketing and sales for a software product is a complete book on its own. So, here, we talk about some basic best practices to keep in mind.
🏆 Positioning: Use your research to position your AI product in the market. Focus on what it does differently and better. Address your product’s benefits to the needs of the user.
⼮ Channels: Leverage channels such as content marketing, advertising, events, demos, and social proof to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
💵 Pricing: Decide what you’re going to charge your customer and how. We explore a few models in the next section.
😎 Customer success: AI tools, by design, get better with use. This means that you need your customers to use the tool for extended periods of time so you can gather and leverage data. Set up strong customer success teams and encourage prolonged usage.
As an ever-evolving technology, AI tools need continuous monitoring and optimization. Enable the model to learn dynamically from new data. Monitor performance to ensure it meets the defined objectives. Collect user feedback and system performance data to keep the AI tool adequate and relevant.
We’ve discussed building and taking the product to market. So now it’s time to discuss the bottomline—quite literally.
Like any business, AI startups need to make money. To that end, they generate revenue through various channels.
Product subscriptions: Startups create AI tools that can be accessed by paying a recurring fee on a subscription-based model. Popular examples include Google Gemini and Jasper.
Licensing: Some startups build AI algorithms and license them to vendors or businesses in industries like healthcare, finance, or retail. Google’s Med-PaLM or OpenAI’s GPT models work this way.
Consulting: Startups provide consulting services, developing customized AI solutions for clients or integrating AI into existing workflows.
Insights: There are also startups that monetize data, selling insights, or predictive analytics derived from proprietary AI models. BloombergGPT is a good example.
Irrespective of the revenue model you choose, keep an eye on the ROI. Given the significant cost, infrastructure, data, and skill involved in building AI tools, return on investment (ROI) can become a faraway dream. This is, in fact, one of the primary challenges of an AI startup.
Building an AI-based business is simpler and easier than most others. For example, if you’d like to open a gym, you need to invest in real estate, equipment, trainers, sales, marketing, etc. An AI-powered workout app, on the other hand, can be built from your garage.
However, there are several other AI challenges you need to consider.
AI tools are built on top of ginormous volumes of data. In acquiring and using this data, you might face challenges, such as:
Before creating an AI tool, thoroughly consider data issues. Get the help of data experts and lawyers to begin on your best footing.
Another form of data is expertise. For example, if you’re designing AI-based workouts, you need subject matter experts to validate the accuracy and suitability of your workout. Your tool can’t recommend customers engage in potentially risky activities just o meet their weight goals.
Consider the inference/recommendation your AI app is offering and sign up experts to validate that. Build an accountability model to ensure that the content is vetted by experts in the area. If you’re working in highly regulated industries like healthcare or finance, pay extra attention and consult with legal experts to guide you.
The cost to launch an AI startup can range from $5,000 to over $100,000, depending on the product, infrastructure, data acquisition, team size, and product development complexity. Often, these costs are incurred upfront, long before the product can be taken to market or produce returns.
To eliminate cost-related challenges, make a clear long-term business plan to earn back your investment. Start with smaller MVP and validate it before you scale up.
As AI systems rely on vast amounts of sensitive data, concerns about privacy and security are to be expected. To avoid breaches, build robust systems to:
Despite the enthusiasm, customers may be wary of AI. This is particularly true in areas like healthcare, investments, or even fashion, where human creativity and judgment are highly valued.
Address this wariness by building trust. Be transparent about how AI is used, what data is collected, and how decisions are made. Give users greater control over their data. Allow them to interact with humans when they want to. Seek and implement feedback.
Since the launch of ChatGPT and similar large language models (LLMs), AI has been everywhere.
Every workplace tool and productivity platform has AI now. Apple is integrating Apple Intelligence to iOS and MacOS. AI-first tools are emerging in every industry and use case.
Yet, we’re just the beginning of a vast opportunity in the AI market. As the next generation of software products, AI startups will redefine technology businesses. If you’d like a piece of that pie, it’s time to get started on your best AI business ideas.
ClickUp has everything you need to make your move. Ideate with ClickUp Brain. Conduct surveys and analyze data with ClickUp Forms. Plan your AI tool development with ClickUp Tasks. Build a CRM, automate workflows, monitor performance, and optimize, all in one place with ClickUp.
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