Modern Creator
Zack Kirk · YouTube

Top 5 AI Agents Selling for $20,000 Right Now

A 14-minute sales playbook disguised as a tutorial — five boring agents, two tiers, specific pricing, and the one thing everyone in AI gets wrong.

Posted
2 days ago
Duration
Format
Talking Head
educational
Views
1.4K
76 likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

The most valuable skill in the AI agency market is not building agents but selling them by reframing the conversation around lost revenue rather than technical features.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • You want to start or grow an AI agency selling to local service businesses but have been stuck consuming build tutorials that never get to the money.
  • You are non-technical and assumed that was a barrier — this argues the opposite: sales skill is the actual moat.
  • You already have one or two clients and want a tiered upsell path from low-ticket recurring to high-ticket one-time engagements.
  • You want specific pricing anchors and cold outreach scripts for each agent type, not general advice.
SKIP IF…
  • You are looking for technical build tutorials — this video explicitly positions itself against that format and contains no code or workflow screenshots.
  • Your target market is enterprise or tech companies — every agent here is designed for local, offline service businesses (plumbers, painters, mechanics).
  • You are already doing six figures in AI agency revenue and need advanced scaling or team management content.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Most AI content teaches building; almost none teaches selling. The creator presents a two-tier framework: starter agents (Google Review Agent at $500-$1K/month, Off-Hours Receptionist at $1-$2K/month) that minimize perceived risk and build trust, followed by breadwinner agents (Full-Time Receptionist at $5-15K upfront, Quoting Agent at $20K, AI Audit at up to $50K) that generate high-ticket one-time revenue. The through-line is pain-point selling — never pitch features, always pitch the dollar cost of the problem the business is already experiencing. Non-technical sellers have a structural advantage because they communicate like the buyer.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:0001:37

01 · The slop problem

AI content is optimized for watch time, not income. Everyone teaches building; nobody teaches selling. That's why most AI agency starters fail.

01:3703:09

02 · Non-technical is the advantage

Business owners don't want a tech wizard — they want someone who speaks their language and can walk them through implementation without jargon.

03:0903:52

03 · Starter agents overview

Introduce the two-tier framework. Starter agents let business owners get a foot in the door with zero risk before committing to high-ticket solutions.

03:5206:43

04 · Agent 1: Google Review Agent

$500-$1K/month. Triggers after a job is complete, prompts customers to leave a Google review. Sells via the gap between their page rank and competitors'. Cold pitch script shown on screen.

06:4309:04

05 · Agent 2: Off-Hours AI Receptionist

$1-$2K/month. Answers calls after hours and books appointments. Sold by cold-calling businesses that don't pick up — the failed call is the pitch.

09:0410:21

06 · Breadwinner agents intro + trust ladder

Starter agents build trust; breadwinners cash out on it. Off-hours receptionist at $1-2K/month becomes the on-ramp to a $10-30K full-time receptionist upsell.

10:2112:39

07 · Agent 3: Full-Time AI Receptionist

$5-$15K upfront + $1-2K/month retainer. The ROI pitch: 10 missed calls/day at $200 avg = $30K/month in lost revenue. Never pitch features — only the dollar cost of the problem.

12:3914:06

08 · Agent 4 & 5: Quoting Agent + AI Audit

Quoting Agent at $20K (4 x $5K) reduces 10-min quotes to 10 seconds — creator's top earner, made him multiple six figures. AI Audit at up to $50K is pure consulting for companies not yet ready to buy an agent but willing to pay for expertise.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • AI agency courses are optimized for YouTube watch time, not student income — most end with 'go sell' after hours of build tutorials.
  • The non-technical AI seller has a structural advantage: they communicate at the buyer's level instead of dazzling them with features they don't understand.
  • A Google Review Agent running at $999/month brings the client $2,371 in extra jobs from 3-4 new bookings — it pays for itself before the first invoice is due.
  • 50% of local businesses don't answer their phones — cold calling them and leaving a voicemail about missed calls is a self-qualifying pitch for the Off-Hours Receptionist.
  • A service business missing 10 calls per day where 5 would've booked at $200 avg is losing $1,000 daily — $30K a month in missed revenue funds a $15K AI receptionist in two weeks.
  • Never pitch AI agent features to a business owner — pitch the exact dollar amount they are currently leaving on the table.
  • Starter agents are trust infrastructure: get a business owner to believe in AI on a $1K/month no-risk product, and a $20K upsell becomes an obvious next step.
  • The Quoting Agent — reducing a 10-minute per-quote process to 10 seconds — is the creator's top earner because every service business has the same bottleneck.
  • An AI Audit is a $50K consulting engagement, not a technical product — it maps AI tools to specific employee roles across every department.
  • Delegating the technical build to developers while focusing on sales is not a shortcut; it is the highest-leverage allocation of a non-technical founder's time.
  • Charging a monthly retainer instead of an upfront setup fee for starter agents removes the psychological barrier of 'making a big AI investment.'
  • Google reviews directly determine local search ranking — a business on page 3 with 30 reviews competes against businesses on page 1 with 400, and that gap is the pitch.
Takeaway

Sell the revenue loss, not the technology.

THE SALES LESSON

The gap between people who make money with AI and people who don't almost always comes down to one thing: whether they learned to sell or just learned to build.

  • Buyers of business tools are not moved by capability demonstrations — they are moved by a precise dollar figure that names what their current problem is costing them every month.
  • Starting a client relationship with a low-risk, low-cost product is not leaving money on the table; it is the mechanism that makes the high-ticket sale feel obvious rather than risky.
  • The 'non-technical' label is a liability in a room of engineers but an asset in a room of business owners who want someone who speaks their language.
  • Cold outreach is self-qualifying when the pain point is visible — a business that doesn't answer its own phone is the target market for the off-hours receptionist, and calling them proves it.
  • Delegating the build to specialists is not a workaround for non-technical sellers; it is the same highest-leverage discipline that any operator applies when time is the scarce resource.
  • An AI audit at $50K is not more complex to sell than a $1K/month retainer — it is actually easier, because the buyer already trusts you and the conversation is about impact rather than proof.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Starter agent
A low-cost, low-risk AI service product (typically $500-$2K/month) designed to give a skeptical business owner a first successful AI implementation before pitching higher-ticket solutions.
Breadwinner agent
A high-ticket AI implementation ($5K-$20K upfront) that addresses a mission-critical business bottleneck — phone answering or customer quoting — with a calculable ROI.
Off-hours receptionist
A voice AI agent that answers inbound calls outside business hours, books appointments, and prevents potential customers from calling a competitor instead.
Quoting agent
An AI system trained on a specific business's pricing logic, parts costs, and labor rates that generates accurate customer quotes in seconds instead of the 10-20 minutes a human requires.
AI Audit
An in-person or remote consulting engagement where an AI advisor maps specific AI tools to each employee's role across all departments, helping a company integrate AI without replacing staff.
Resources

Things they pointed at.

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:18
99% of the video is them screen sharing some random build out process for hours and hours. And then at the very end of the video, they say, okay, then go out to business owners and try to sell this stuff.
Perfect cold open against a saturated content genre — will resonate with anyone who wasted time on these videosTikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
09:37
How many times within this video have I talked about the features of an AI receptionist? Zero. What I've instead talked about is the pain of lost revenue that these business owners are feeling on a daily basis.
Standalone sales principle, needs zero context, immediately actionableIG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
10:16
Spending $10,000 upfront for an AI receptionist sounds like a lot until they realize that gets paid for itself in ten days.
Tight price objection reframe with a specific number — quotable standalonenewsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
13:16
Quoting agents take that time from ten minutes per quote to ten seconds per quote. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Specific before/after metric — works as a hook for anyone who sells servicesTikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

analogystory
00:00If you've ever wanted to get into the AI space and start a business, I bet you've seen a million of these videos. How to build and sell AI agents, ultimate beginner's guide, or learn Claude from scratch four hour long course. There is a reason why these courses are blowing up all over the Internet, and the reason being the entire video is slop and it's designed to keep your watch time in order to blow up the video more.
00:24What I mean by this is I guarantee you if you go to anyone's full course video on the AI space, whether it's AI agents, Claude, anything, 99% of the video is them screen sharing some random build out process for hours and hours and hours. And then at the very end of the video, they say, okay. Then go out to business owners and try to sell this stuff.
00:42And that is the reason why so many people are failing within the AI space. No one tells you how to actually monetize this skill. Everyone's showing you how to build it.
00:50Everyone's getting dopamine from hopping in ClawdCode, from hopping in NAN, building out these workflows and automations, but no one actually wants to do the hard work to create a business around this stuff and genuinely help other business owners implement AI technology within their company. So in this video, it's not gonna be fun whatsoever, but I'm gonna walk through the five boring AI agents you need to start selling to business owners.
01:12How to get the leads? How to actually sell them on the AI agent? And then how much to price later on?
01:17These agents range from just $500 a month to $55,000 upfront with the 8,000 monthly retainer, so it really depends on exactly what part of the market you wanna hit.
01:27But before I get into this video, I wanna preface. The AI space is dominated by technical people who don't necessarily have skills in other realms, and that's why there's such a window of opportunity for an average everyday person to get into the AI space.
01:42Focus on sales, focus on marketing, focus on relationship building with these business owners and showing them the power of implementing AI technology within their business and then delegating the back end work to a developer who could do it better than you. Everyone likes to say, oh, I'm learning these tools so I can never get replaced by AI.
01:59I'm so valuable with my understanding of this technology and my ability to use it that I can never get replaced by it. And that's actually not the most valuable skill within the AI market right now. It's the ability to be able to take a business owner from knowing nothing about AI to being an AI focused company setting up a strong foundation in it so they beat out their competition.
02:18Just put yourself in the shoes of a business owner right now. Do you wanna be sold by a technical person who's talking about the capabilities of AI and all the features? Or would you like to be sold by someone who isn't necessarily a tech wizard on the back end just like you?
02:32Someone who understands this technology and can walk you through the steps of implementing AI into your business, making you feel comfortable and making sure that you understand this technology before going all in on it. I take the latter every single time, and I bet you every single service based business in your local area would rather be be sold on a more consulting path so they can understand the technology before they go all in on it.
02:53Let's jump right into the first tier of AI agents, which is what I like to call the starter agents. The reason being and the reason I call these starter agents and the reason why you should start selling these agents before anything else is because they allow the business owner to take on zero risk when implementing. What I mean by this is a lot of business owners, the truth of the matter is they have their guards up when it comes to AI.
03:14The reason being it's a new technology and it is risky. Imagine you implement an AI system that directly interacts with their customers and fucks up. That AI agent is gonna lose them revenue and that's what they're scared of.
03:27So these starter agents allow the business owner to kind of get their foot in the door when it comes to AI. It allows them to set up a strong foundation in the technology so when they believe in it, you can upsell them on a high ticket agent that directly interacts with their customers and really moves the needle. So let's kick it off with starter agent number one, a Google review agent.
03:46This agent triggers right after a service based business completes a job. So pretend you're a painter. You get a client, you paint their room, you finish that job.
03:55Immediately when they send the invoice, it texts them and calls them prompting them to leave a Google review. All it simply does is help them collect more Google reviews automatically, and this is a huge pain point for a lot of business owners.
04:08I guarantee you go to your local business, search up on the second or third page, and all those service based businesses will have a low amount of Google reviews and a low rating. That kills a business's digital presence because no one will trust a business that has 30 reviews in a three out of five star. They're gonna go to the first page that has 354.8 stars, and that's just a simple truth.
04:29And that's exactly how you sell it. Nobody else is talking about this, but you go to that business owner, whether it's a cold call, cold email, or you go in person and say, hey, look. I was looking for businesses in your niche.
04:40I found your business way down low on the Google page, and you guys have low Google reviews and a low rating. Customers are getting turned off by that, and they're going to your competition. I'll build you a Google review agent that'll collect all your customers and prompt them to leave a Google review.
04:56This will help the business owner in ways that they can't even comprehend because one, they're gonna get more customers because the reviews are higher, they seem more credible. Two, it doesn't really cost and doesn't really allow them to take on very much risk. I would personally charge 500 to $1,000 a month with no upfront setup fee.
05:13Guys, if you do this correctly, you can stack on ten, twenty, 30 of these businesses paying you a thousand bucks a month, and that's $30,000 every single month in recurring revenue guaranteed to come in. And they're so easy to sell because the average job for a service based business owner is oftentimes five hundred to a thousand bucks.
05:30So if you're able to bring them two, three, four jobs a month because the ratings are way higher and they seem way more credible alongside the fact that they're gonna get more referrals, it pays for itself. So it's a no brainer for them to implement.
05:43And last but not least, the cherry on top for this agent, it makes them more competitive in a local search. The more reviews, the more credibility, the more rating you have, the higher you get pushed up on that Google page. And if you can bring a business to first, second, or third, they're gonna get so many more customers.
05:59And on the fulfillment side of these agents, you guys know I preach a lot the fact that you need to be doing your highest leverage task. In this regard, the highest leverage task is getting as many of these business owners through the door and selling them on these agents and delegating the back end work to a really good team of developers who can do it better than you.
06:16But in this case, these agents are so easy to build. I would just do it yourself and have a 100% profit margin. Even if you're nontechnical, it is so easy.
06:25Claude Co. Can do this. Go to VoiceThrow.
06:26It can do it all for you. There's so many tutorials on YouTube. Now is the time where you can search up a tutorial on YouTube and actually learn how to do it.
06:33That's what this video is directly against those super long tutorials saying, hey. Watch this four hour course and learn how to build an AI agent, and you're gonna make a ton money. It's complete bullshit.
06:41But in this regard, find out the agent you wanna sell, and then watch the tutorial if you wanna do the development side of that business and learn how to build it. Alright. Let's jump straight into the second AI agent and off hours AI receptionist.
06:54This AI voice agent answers the phone during hours in which the business is not open. Instead of calls going straight to voicemail, the AI receptionist picks up and books that appointment, and this helps business owners so much. The reason being these business owners think that these people are gonna call back.
07:10That's not the case. If you're calling a business and they're closed, what are you doing? Oh, waiting for a callback from them?
07:15No way. You're calling the next lead on Google. So this agent ensures that every single call coming in during off hours gets answered and booked in.
07:23How do you sell this without spending money on ads? Well, it's really easy. Cold call a 100 business owners.
07:28I guarantee you 50% of them won't even pick up the phone. Leave a voice mail and do the very pitch. Hey.
07:35Look. I've called a bunch of service based businesses in your area. All your competition have answered the phone and booked me in and you are not getting to the phone.
07:43How do you expect to compete? I'll build you a demo of an off hours AI receptionist to pick up all your calls. A large majority of them are gonna call you back and get a meeting booked because this is genuinely valuable.
07:54Everyone trying to start an AI agency or get into the AI space right now is trying to cold call and pitch them something that they don't really need. But if they're not picking up the phone, you know they have the pain point that this off hours agent can solve, so it's a very easy pitch. For pricing, I would charge 1 to $2,000 a month.
08:10There is a little bit of cost that comes with the volume of calls, but it shouldn't be an issue. And the reason I like to charge a monthly retainer rather than an upfront setup fee for these starter agents is because you don't want the business owner to feel like they're making a huge investment in AI. For example, with the off hours receptionist, you want them to feel like it's a no brainer to get this stuff implemented.
08:29Once they implement that off hours receptionist, they're gonna trust AI because it's doing such a good job for them When you come to them later on and say, hey. Look. Let's build a full time AI receptionist to answer calls twenty four seven.
08:40They're gonna say yes every single time. And that's a easy $10.20, $30,000 upsell off simply building trust with a starter agent, showing the value of implementing AI, and then upselling when they trust it. That brings us right into our next category, the breadwinner agents.
08:55These agents have made me the most amount of money and you could sell for the highest upfront setup fee. And following the same theme, the first breadwinner agent is a full time AI receptionist. These business owners are either losing out on a $100,000 a year for an employee to sit there and answer the phone, or if they're doing it themselves and they get 20 calls a day and 50% of them go missed because they're on the job site and they can't get to every call.
09:17And out of those 10 calls that go miss every single day, five would have resulted in clients and their average job size is $200. They're losing a thousand dollars a day. That's $30,000 a month in missed revenue.
09:28So when you come along and hit on these pain points of all this lost revenue coming in, it's a no brainer. Like, spending $10,000 upfront for an AI receptionist sounds like a lot until they realize that gets paid for itself in ten days if they're answering the phone themselves. That's what so many AI agency owners are doing wrong right now when it comes to selling to business owners.
09:48They're trying to sell their AI agents based off the features and capabilities that they have. How many times within this video have I talked about the features of an AI receptionist? Zero.
09:57What I've instead talked about is the pain of lost revenue that these business owners are feeling on a daily basis, and that's how you wanna sell to them. When pricing the AI receptionist, I would charge anywhere from 5 to $15,000 upfront with a monthly retainer of 1 to $2,000.
10:12I'm telling you it sounds like a lot right now, but if you hit on these pain points, promise you the sale is pretty easy. You might be saying now, Zach, we talked about the pain point of misrevenue. The AI receptionist completely helps with that.
10:23What's the pain point of time spent doing a task in which the business owner really shouldn't be doing? And that brings us to our next breadwinner agent, which are quoting agents. And quoting agents in 2026 are my top selling AI agent, and I've made multiple 6 figures selling these because they save the business owners so much time.
10:40These quoting agents attack a bottleneck that every single business has or at least every single service based business. Put it more simply, giving price estimates to potential customers who are interested in said service. Pretend you're on the side of the road and your brakes aren't working.
10:55You call a mobile mechanic and you say, hey. I'm driving a 2017 Honda Civic. My rotors are broken.
11:00My brakes are broken. I feel squeaking and grinding when I press on the brake pad. That business owner then has to go into their parts supplier, figure out the exact parts they need to get for a 2017 Honda Civic, write down how much it cost them, write down their markup rates, write down their hourly rate, how long is it gonna take to drive to the customer, how long is it gonna take to complete the job.
11:21All this goes into one quote. And that's why each quote takes ten to twenty minutes even for an experienced business owner. Quoting agents take that time from ten minutes per quote to ten seconds per quote.
11:31It's absolutely ridiculous. And a lot of these business owners are spending two to three hours a day simply quoting. These are the agents that you need to be selling.
11:40Something that genuinely moves the needle for a business either saving them this much time or a ton of money. My quoting agent package is for $20,000 split up over four payments of $5,000.
11:51And then after that four month duration, they can either renew or stop. And 99% of the time, they're gonna renew because this is so valuable for just $5 a month. Quoting agents are very difficult to build because there's so much training that goes into actually giving super accurate pricing exactly how the business owner would.
12:08But if you have a good team of developers on the back end, it should be no issue. If you wanna get into the AI space, but you're not technical, wanna work with me one on one as well as my team of developers, apply down below. And last but not least, the final AI agent we're gonna be talking about in this video is actually not an AI agent.
12:23It's an AI workshop or AI audit. An AI audit is put simply a workshop that you run for a business who's looking to eventually invest in AI technology, but doesn't necessarily understand how it works and doesn't understand where within their specific roles and departments AI would be useful. Put it simply, there's a ton of businesses who know they need to implement AI technology, but aren't ready to make a $20.30, $40,000 investment in implementation just yet, but they're willing to pay for consulting because they want their employees.
12:53They don't necessarily want to replace employees, but they want these employees to be working as efficiently as possible and utilizing AI technology for their specific roles. These larger companies have a ton of different departments such as sales, marketing, fulfillment.
13:07They have all these things going on, so they want their sales reps to be utilizing AI as efficiently as possible. They want their marketing people to be utilizing AI technology to work more efficiently.
13:17I have an in person audit coming up in New York City in early August that I'm really excited for, and this is a $50,000 package because me and my team are directly flying out. We're helping each one of their employees use AI effectively within their specific roles. Don't sleep on AI consulting.
13:33I know you're not selling that high ticket agent right away, but you need to understand. You build the trust with the business owner. Show them that you're the expert when it comes to AI.
13:42Show them how they can use their employees to work as effectively as possible. And once they trust this technology, they will pay you an absurd amount of money for any AI agent you wanna sell them later on. That just about wraps up this video.
13:54If you guys want me to post any sort of guide or tutorial on one of these specific agents, let me know in the comments. Please like, subscribe, and I'll see you guys in the next one.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Every 'learn AI' video follows the same arc: four hours of screen-sharing a workflow, then a two-second 'go sell it' at the end. This one skips the build and goes straight to the business — five agents, two tiers, real pricing, and the cold outreach scripts that close service-business owners who've never touched AI.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

03:09model

Starter → Breadwinner trust ladder

  1. Google Review Agent ($500-$1K/mo)
  2. Off-Hours Receptionist ($1-$2K/mo)
  3. Full-Time Receptionist ($5-$15K up + retainer)
  4. Quoting Agent ($20K)
  5. AI Audit (up to $50K)

Sequence agents from lowest to highest perceived risk. Win trust with cheap, low-stakes implementations before pitching high-ticket solutions.

Steal forAny productized service ladder — price anchoring and trust sequencing applies to any consulting/agency model
09:24concept

Lost revenue ROI pitch

Never sell AI features. Calculate the specific dollar amount the business is losing due to the exact problem your agent solves, then show payback timeline. Make the investment feel cheap relative to the ongoing loss.

Steal forAny B2B sales pitch for a productivity or automation product
CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK
14:00link
If you wanna get into the AI space but you're not technical, wanna work with me one on one as well as my team of developers, apply down below.

Verbal mention only with Typeform link in description. Soft and late — entire video is the sales pitch for the offer.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Storyboard

Visual structure at a glance.

open
hookopen00:00
slop B-roll
hookslop B-roll00:22
how to monetize
promisehow to monetize00:46
five agents overview
valuefive agents overview02:53
starter agents
valuestarter agents03:44
cold outreach script
valuecold outreach script04:49
the math
valuethe math05:31
climb the page
valueclimb the page05:52
breadwinner agents
valuebreadwinner agents09:02
$30K a month gone
value$30K a month gone09:23
10 min to 10 sec
value10 min to 10 sec11:09
full lineup recap
valuefull lineup recap12:37
your team AI-powered
valueyour team AI-powered13:16
how to win clients
ctahow to win clients13:37
Frame Gallery

Visual moments.

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