Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of the most used digital tools in our daily lives today. Like myself, I use it as a writing assistant even though I do not rely solely on it but I used AI to assist myself in topic research and to make sure what I’m writing about is evergreen, original, impactful and unique. If I tell you about how to make money with AI in Nigeria, you will definitely be surprised because you have been using AI tools daily without knowing you could actually be making money from it.
You have been using tools like chatgpt which is a chatbot from Open AI for writing social media posts, writing formal letters, newsletters, and most of the time we use it to surf the Internet too.
Little did you know you could monetize the way you use AI. For example, someone who is aware that AI can assist him digitally with many things but does not know how to do it can actually be taught what he or she wants to learn. What if you decide to be selling AI prompts? Because AI can actually do many things if rightly prompted.
Introduction
The digital space has been evolving with new innovations being launched almost annually by tech companies. For example, in the year 1990 the first search engine (Archie built by Alan Emtage) was launched and a decade later Google came out too.
Towards another decade Blockchain technology was created and the first digital coin (Bitcoin) was created to be traded on a Blockchain.
Now, what’s reigning in the technology space is Artificial Intelligence (AI). This digital tool seems to know everything especially those that happened before its emergence.
You can ask AI to write an article and it will do just that and even more perfect than you can. Ask it to search a query on the web and it will. It will pick basic information from many websites and rewrite or paraphrase it to give you a unique piece of writing that can’t be found anywhere online.
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is defined as a technology that machines use to carry out tasks which require human intelligence such as problems-solving, decision making, learning and reasoning.
I did say AI seems to know everything, but here is what it does, when you ask AI a question, it will quickly surf the Internet in seconds and gather information across other websites and then rewrite or typically paraphrase it to give you a unique answer that most times seems to be accurate.
AI is designed to be learning from sometimes answers they provide. For example when you ask a question it will provide two answers and ask you to choose one that is appropriate for the context you wanted. The answer you choose will be saved in its database. That means it has learned a new thing and subsequently it will be using the answer you chose to answer other people when they ask similar questions.
How does AI work?
Article intelligence (AI) works by simply learning from a large amount of data such as text or images after recognizing the patterns it uses to make decisions or predictions with little or no human guidance.
We won’t be going deep into how artificial intelligence works because what we are more concerned about now is how to make money with AI. So let’s proceed with the business of the day.
Why AI Is a Game-Changer in Nigeria
AI is truly changing the narrative not just in Nigeria but globally, it has so much impact on businesses in Nigeria helping them to carry out many tasks. For example, the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) recently integrated Al on its website to help with both “name search”, name reservation and business registration.
Before the integration of the AI on the CAC website, when you want to register a business reservation of name alone used to take up to two days and during weekends it was impossible until the next working day. This was because it was done by humans and they were manually doing all the work so it used to take so much time.
But now the story is completely different because even weekends AI will be handling all the jobs and the complete registration of a business can be done in just one day. What used to take more than a week to complete.
So AI has become a game changer in Nigeria because it’s impacting positively on businesses, assisting them with many jobs that ordinarily used to be quite time consuming.
7 Real Ways to Make Money with AI in Nigeria
When talking about how to make money with AI in Nigeria, there are actually many ways by which we can use AI to make money in Nigeria. Whether you are a student, freelancer, business owners and almost all categories of people have their own ways by which they can use AI to make money.
In the context of what we are discussing let’s just highlight only seven ways out of the numerous ways to make money with AI.
1. Content Creation: creating content just got better with the assistance of the artificial intelligence tools today. Whether it’s written content or video content, both of them can be done effortlessly with the use of AI.
We make money on blogs by simply writing articles and getting traffic of readers on those articles which when monetized can generate a substantial income for us.
We also make money by posting videos on YouTube and getting traffic of viewers on those videos which if monetized can generate a passive income for us.
All of these contents can be made with AI today. All you need to do is simply type a prompt based on what you want it to do for and it will generate a professional article or video even images for you.
For example if I want AI to write an article for me, let’s use chatgpt as a case study here, just type the following prompt;
“Use the following information to write an article, make sure you create relevant outlines and base your writing on those outlines”.
When you run the prompt, chatgpt will write a professional article using the information you have provided which typically could be a summary or brief information of what you want it to write.
You may decide to post it on social media and if your social media account is monetized you will make money from it.
2. Chatbot building for Nigerian SMEs: this particular one requires a skill, so those who have the skill can make money by building a chatbot for Nigerian businesses.
What a chatbot does is just similar to customer service agents. Most of the SMEs in Nigeria do not provide a 24/7 customer service, so you can approach them and if they are willing then you can build a chatbot for them which can represent the human agents to answer some questions being asked by customers.
AI uses mostly frequently asked questions to provide an accurate answer.
3. AI image and logo generation for local brands: did you know that you can design any logo and I’m image with AI? Of course, you can make money with AI in Nigeria by simply creating logos or images for our local brands.
Every business is supposed to have a logo which shows identity. So you can be designing logos for businesses in Nigeria and they will definitely pay you for your services.
4. Selling AI tools or subscriptions as an affiliate: there is a trending thing on Facebook lately, Facebook users are advertising “cut cap pro lifetime”. So if you want to make money with AI, one of the ways is to subscribe for its pro version then you will be selling its access to the those who need them.
5. AI-powered data entry and transcription jobs: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is practically replacing the old system of data entry which was more consuming. You may be contracted to do the job.
6. AI digital marketing (ads, SEO, analytics): another way of how to make money with AI is to venture into AI digital marketing. Here you will be contracted to use AI and create Ads for a particular brand.
Let me show you how to do this in a quick way;
Let’s just say your brand’s name is “Short Ads” and you want to promote it on social media, so you want to do a video Ads.
Step 1: Go to chatgpt, and type a prompt like “create an 8 seconds AI video generator prompt about:
A 10 year old Nigerian boy making a selfie with his phone walking on Lagos road. The boy is saying “hi, welcome to Short Ads, a YouTube channel that teaches you how to make AI videos like this one”.
Chatgpt will fine-tune the prompt and even describe the camera movements and angles of shot as seen in the screenshot below;
Step 2: Copy the prompt that chatgpt has created and go to Google.
Step 3: On Google search “flow”, flow is a video generator tool in Google labs.
Step 4: Flow now opens, sign-in using your google account. Then check those two buttons to be receiving updates and then accept the terms and conditions.
Step 5: Click on “create new project” then paste the prompt you copied from chatgpt.
Step 6: Click the right arrow button as shown in the screenshot below.
Step 7: wait for flow to generate the AI video. The video below is what flow has created for our Short Ads brand;
7. Launching AI training courses or WhatsApp classes: the seventh way that I’m going to teach you on how to make money with AI in Nigeria is by launching an AI training class on WhatsApp.
You don’t need equipment all that is needed by you and your students is a smartphone. You may run an Ad on social media and when people see it they may click to join the WhatsApp group.
Then after charging then a small few you will send them a pre-recorded video teaching them what they can use AI to do.
Tools Nigerians Can Use (Free & Paid)
The digital tools Nigerians can use to make money with AI are:
Chatgpt
Chatgpt is the chatbot of the Open AI, and it’s free especially for what I taught you earlier. Creating prompts, writing articles, social media posts and using it to surf the Internet is completely free. However, if you want to use its advanced tools then you may subscribe to the paid plans.
Canva
Canva can be used for image creation, logo designs and even video editing. It also has both free and paid plans. Here you select a free template and edit it to easily achieve what you want to create.
Flow
Flow is a Google labs tool for creating videos. It has both free plans and paid plans. Every new member has 100 credit points, each video created is 20 credit points, so you will use a new account to create five videos.
Challenges and How to Overcome Them
There are challenges that may be faced while trying to make money with AI especially in Nigeria. Some of these changes and how we can overcome them are as follows;
- Electricity: electricity remains the most challenging thing in Nigeria, Nigeria is yet to have a stable power supply unlike those European countries. We use electricity to charge our mobile phones and PCs which are our tools for utilizing AI to make money. To overcome this, we have to provide for ourselves alternatives source of power like solar panels, power banks and a generator set.
- Data subscription: we cannot be able to connect our devices on the Internet unless we subscribe to a data plan. Nigeria, Network providers sell data plans very costly so it remains one of our major challenges too. To overcome this, we need to buy devices like Star link which when you purchase a plan it will remain unlimited until the time elapses.
- Skill: lack of skills can also pose as a challenge. If you do not know how to read and write, prompting AI will be very challenging and AI won’t just create content for you until prompted to do so.
Conclusion
After studying how to make money with AI in Nigeria, take action immediately. You can start small with the free tools and later subscribe to the paid plans because just like I said earlier technology is evolving on a daily basis and if we fail to harness the benefits another one will come and the former may be abandoned.
However, I’m not guaranteeing you that you are going to be rich with my tips on how to make money with AI but it’s my personal experience so I decided to share them with you. Do your own research and try out what you feel may work for you.
This is an interesting article.
This is quite interesting and educative to read.
Thank you Hon Terfa Ukende for this article.