I have been building businesses online for more than 20 years, and I have seen a lot of changes.
I was around when the Internet was still becoming a serious business opportunity. I watched affiliate marketing develop, blogging become mainstream, search engines change the way businesses attracted customers, and social media create entirely new ways to build an audience.
So when I see another major technological shift happening, I tend to look at it a little differently.
And right now, I think we are at the beginning of something very significant.
Artificial intelligence is changing how people can create and operate online businesses. And Wealthy Affiliate is about to launch a completely rebuilt platform designed around that reality.
At the centre of the new WA platform is a custom-built AI system called ACE.
But before getting into ACE itself, there is a bigger point worth considering.
The Best Days of Online Business May Still Be Ahead
Kyle, one of the co-founders of Wealthy Affiliate, recently published a post titled “The Glory Days Are Ahead of Us. Full Stop.”
The title caught my attention because it is a pretty bold statement from someone who has been involved in online business for more than two decades.
But the reasoning behind it is interesting.
Kyle compares the current adoption of AI with the earlier adoption of personal computers and the Internet. His point is that major technological transitions don’t necessarily create a brief opportunity that disappears after a year or two.
The Internet created opportunities for decades.
Affiliate marketing, blogging, ecommerce, SEO, PPC and countless other online businesses grew out of that transition.
And we may now be entering another transition, only this time it is happening much faster.
Kyle points to research showing just how quickly generative AI has been adopted compared with earlier technologies. According to the figures he discusses, generative AI reached widespread adoption much faster than either personal computers or the Internet.
That speed is important.
It means that people who learn how to use AI effectively for business now are potentially getting involved during the early stages of a very large shift.
You don’t have to believe that AI will magically make everyone successful.
It won’t.
But the tools available to an individual business owner today are already dramatically different from what was available 10, 15 or 20 years ago.
And they are still improving.
This Is Where the New Wealthy Affiliate Comes In
This is what makes the upcoming Wealthy Affiliate platform particularly interesting to me.
Wealthy Affiliate isn’t simply adding an AI chatbot to its existing platform. The entire platform is being rebuilt with AI much more deeply integrated into the experience, with ACE at the centre of it.
Instead of having to figure everything out for yourself before you even know where to start, you can explain what you want to do and have ACE help you work out a direction.
And that could make a big difference.
One of the biggest problems for anyone starting an online business has always been the same simple question:
“Where do I even begin?”
You might have an interest but no business idea. You might have a business idea but no idea how to turn it into a website. You might already have a business but want to attract more customers online.
Or you might simply know that you want to build something online, but have absolutely no idea what that something should be.
ACE is being designed to help with all of these starting points. You can begin with an idea, an interest, a problem you want to solve, or even just a desire to build something online, and use the conversation with ACE to start turning that vague idea into something more concrete.
That is a pretty significant change in the way someone could begin building an online business.
You Can Meet ACE Before You Join
This is one of the things I find particularly interesting.
ACE won’t simply be something available after you become a Wealthy Affiliate member.
The plan is for ACE to be integrated into the main Wealthy Affiliate homepage.
That means someone who has never heard of Wealthy Affiliate can arrive at the site, start talking with ACE and begin exploring an online business idea before becoming a member.
Kyle recently demonstrated how this external ACE experience is intended to work.
Beer with Kyle: Fridays the External Ace Flow Turning First Time Visitors Into Builders
You can arrive with an existing business, an idea for a business, or no real idea at all.
ACE can ask questions about what you want to do, what problem you might want to solve, who you might want to help and where your potential audience might be found.
It can then start putting together a possible business direction.
That is very different from landing on a traditional sales page and being presented with a list of features and membership benefits.
Instead, visitors can actually do something; they can start to brainstorm some ideas and have ACE work with them to turn them into a concrete business plan.
An Example: Turning an Interest Into a Business
Kyle’s example is a good illustration of this.
He used knitting as an example.
Imagine someone arrives at the Wealthy Affiliate website and says they are interested in knitting.
They might not know what a niche is. They might not know whether they should sell products, teach people, create content or promote other people’s products.
ACE can help them explore those possibilities.
In Kyle’s demonstration, the conversation eventually moves toward reviewing knitting gear and patterns.
From there, ACE asks about potential sources of traffic and starts putting together a business plan.
The example eventually produces something called “Knitting Gear HQ” – a proposed website featuring reviews, affiliate links, social media content and an email signup.
The important part isn’t whether knitting is the perfect business.
It’s the process.
An ordinary interest can become a potential business concept, without the person having to understand all the terminology or technology before they begin.
That could remove a significant barrier for someone who is completely new to online business.
AI Doesn’t Replace the Business Owner
This is also where I think it is important to be realistic. AI isn’t going to build a successful business for you while you sit on the sofa. You still need to make decisions, understand your audience, create something people actually want, and learn how to attract visitors and turn those visitors into customers, subscribers or buyers. And, of course, you still need to put in the work.
What AI can do is reduce a lot of the friction involved in getting from an idea to something real. That’s a big difference.
Twenty years ago, if you wanted to create an online business, there were plenty of technical barriers. You might have needed to learn how to build a website, find hosting, understand HTML, hire a designer, create content and then figure out how to get people to find it.
Today, many of those barriers are already much lower. AI is pushing them even lower, making it possible for someone with an idea to get started without first having to become a technical expert.
Why This Matters to Affiliate Marketers
This is particularly relevant if you are interested in affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing has always had a relatively low barrier to entry compared with starting many traditional businesses, but that doesn’t mean it has been easy.
The difficult part has often been knowing what to build, what audience to target, what content to create and how all the pieces fit together.
That’s exactly the sort of problem an integrated AI system can potentially help with.
And because ACE is being built into the Wealthy Affiliate environment rather than simply bolted on as a separate AI writing tool, the goal is much more specific. It has been designed to help with the actual process of building an online business.
Wealthy Affiliate Is Rebuilding From the Ground Up
According to Kyle, the new platform isn’t simply an update to the existing Wealthy Affiliate interface. The company has been rebuilding the environment around AI, with a much more integrated approach to actually building and running an online business.
The new platform is also being designed with a mobile-first approach, which makes sense when so much Internet activity now happens on smartphones. And this isn’t intended to be a finished product that simply gets released and then left alone. The platform is expected to continue evolving as AI technology improves.
In fact, that ongoing development may be more important than the initial launch itself. AI is moving so quickly that no platform can afford to stand still. The important question isn’t simply whether a company has added AI to its platform in 2026. It’s whether the platform has been designed to keep adapting as AI becomes more capable.
What This Means for Someone Starting Today
If you have been thinking about starting an online business but have been putting it off because you don’t know where to begin, Wealthy Affiliate can help you plan and build one from scratch.
You don’t necessarily need to arrive with a perfectly researched business plan, and you don’t need to know exactly what your niche is. You don’t even need to know how to build a website before you start. With the new external ACE experience, you may not even need to become a member before you can begin exploring your idea.
You can simply start with a conversation. ACE can help you think through what you want to do, explore different possibilities and begin turning an idea into an actual plan. From there, the goal is to move naturally into a workspace where you can start building your business.
That is a very different starting point from the one I had when I first started building businesses online. Back then, there was a lot more to figure out before you could even get started.
And honestly, I think that’s a good thing.
The Timing Is What Interests Me Most
There is a tendency to look at new technology and think we should wait until everything is finished before getting involved. But that’s rarely how major technological transitions work.
The people who benefited from the Internet didn’t wait until 2015 to decide whether it was going to be important. They started experimenting while things were still changing. They learned, adapted and built, and many of them were still benefiting from what they had built years later.
That’s why I found Kyle’s recent comments about the “glory days” particularly interesting. His argument isn’t simply that AI is another exciting new technology. It’s that we may be at the beginning of another long period of change in the way businesses are built and operated online.
And if that’s true, then the next few years could turn out to be much more important than they initially appear.
ACE Could Be the Most Interesting Part of the New Wealthy Affiliate
I’ve used Wealthy Affiliate for years, and what interests me about this new version isn’t simply that it has AI. There are already plenty of AI tools available. What I find interesting is the attempt to put AI directly into the process of building an online business.
Having ACE available right on the public Wealthy Affiliate homepage makes that even more interesting. Someone can arrive without knowing exactly what they want to build, talk through an idea, explore different possibilities and eventually develop a game plan. From there, they can move into the Wealthy Affiliate environment and start building.
That seems like a much more natural journey than asking someone to learn how a complicated platform works before they even know what they want to do with it.
The new platform isn’t available yet, and some of the details may change as it gets closer to launch. But Kyle has already shown enough of the new environment to make it clear that this is much more than a cosmetic update. It represents a fundamental rethink of how Wealthy Affiliate can help people build online businesses.
And I think that’s worth paying attention to.
The Glory Days May Really Be Ahead
I’ve been involved in online business long enough to remember when many of the things we now take for granted didn’t even exist. That’s why I’m reluctant to believe that we’ve somehow reached the end of the opportunity.
If anything, I think the opposite may be true.
The Internet created enormous opportunities for ordinary people to build businesses from their computers. AI could make that process accessible to an entirely new group of people, while giving existing business owners tools that would have seemed almost impossible a few years ago.
Wealthy Affiliate is clearly positioning its new platform around this change, and ACE could turn out to be one of the most interesting parts of it.
The new platform is expected to launch soon, so I’ll be watching closely as more details emerge and we get to see how it works in the real world.
If you’re interested in building an online business, this may be a particularly good time to start paying attention.
The next chapter of online business is already being written.
And we may be much closer to the beginning of it than the end.
Disclosure: Wealthy Affiliate is an affiliate program I have recommended on Top5Programs since 2017. If you join through one of my links, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. My comments above are based on my own experience and my current understanding of the platform; earnings from community engagement are not guaranteed.
Leave a Reply