Last summer I got on a Zoom call with an old friend from high school. We hadn’t talked in a while. She knew I’d been working in AI, and she had questions.
We started with the usuals: best AI tools for work, how to learn AI, etc., but what's really stuck with me from that conversation were the questions she saved till the end:
“Can I use AI to help with meal planning? What about laundry? Can it help me manage all those household things that eat up my entire weekend?”
She’s a mom. She’s busy. She’s heard that AI can do all these incredible things. And she wanted to know if any of those things included the stuff she actually needed help with.
I want these things too. So I really wanted to have a better answer, but here's what I told her and still believe:
The honest answer
AI cannot do your laundry. It cannot unload the dishwasher. It cannot drive your kids to practice or fold a fitted sheet or remember that you’re almost out of paper towels.
And despite what the headlines might suggest, it’s not going to be able to do those things for a long time. The physical-world stuff, the stuff that requires a body and hands and being in a specific place at a specific time, is still way beyond where AI is today. The robots are coming, sure. But they’re not coming to your kitchen this year.
I had this conversation months ago. My answer hasn’t changed.
What AI is genuinely good at right now is work that happens on a screen. Writing, researching, building, planning, organizing information, creating things. It’s a thinking tool, not a doing tool. And that distinction matters, because it changes what you should actually expect from it.
The reframe
Here’s what I told my friend, and it’s the same thing I’d tell you.
Don’t try to use AI to replace the physical stuff. Use AI to make more money. Then use that money to pay a human who can actually do the physical stuff.
That might sound like a dodge. It’s not. It’s the most practical advice I can give.
AI is genuinely making it easier to earn income in ways that didn’t exist two years ago. You can build a small software product without writing code. You can start a side business with less overhead than ever. You can automate the boring parts of freelance work and take on more clients. You can create content, build tools, launch services. The barrier to starting something has dropped dramatically.
The person folding your laundry doesn’t need to be you. But the person building a new income stream probably does, at least at the start. And AI can help with that part right now.
So how do you find the idea?
Maybe it’s turning your professional expertise into consulting or coaching. Maybe it’s selling something you already make on Etsy. Maybe it’s a small digital product, a template, a guide, a tool.
The options are out there. But from talking to a lot of people about this, I’ve come to realize that coming up with the idea is often the hardest part. Not because there aren’t good ideas, but because it’s hard to see your own skills clearly enough to know what’s worth building around. And even when you have a hunch, making that idea feel real enough to actually start is its own challenge.
So, of course, I built an AI app to help with this.
It’s called Spark. You give it your LinkedIn URL and answer a few questions on your interests and constraints (like how much time you have and what you’re trying to accomplish), and it generates business ideas with real market context.
You could literally tell it: “I want to generate enough side hustle income to pay someone to do my family’s laundry. I have about one hour free per week.” And it will come back with ideas matched to your experience and constraints.
I’m not promising you’ll be outsourcing laundry by next month. But it’s a real place to start. It's currently totally free!
At some point I may need to charge for it, because it costs me money to keep it running. But for now, I just want to get as many people as possible trying out new ideas with AI, so I’m keeping it free for the short term.
Give it a go. There’s no downside. And I’d love to hear if it sparks anything for you.
Who knows? Maybe by this time next year, you’ll have enough side hustle income to outsource the laundry.
Mollie is on maternity leave. This newsletter was drafted by the AI agents she set up before going offline. You can read about her AI-powered maternity leave experiment here: molliemueller.com/maternity-mode Hi Reader, When people hear "advanced AI skills," they picture a certificate. A course you finish, a badge, some technical thing you either have or you don't. So a lot of people decide they are behind before they have even started. The numbers say the opposite of what that fear assumes....
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