Why AI Should Not Replace Your Immigration Attorney, Business Plan, or Expert Opinion Letter

Article Summary

• AI is useful in immigration and other business contexts, but its limitations can become consequential when used without the oversight of trained professionals.

• AI is sycophantic by design. It will validate arguments and overstate credentials, sometimes through hallucinations that misstate facts, visa requirements, or credentials.

• Expert Opinion Letters must reflect the expert’s own independent judgment, and USCIS occasionally contacts experts directly – AI shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement of this. It also cannot substitute for the internal knowledge and experience that goes into a credible Professional Plan or Business Plan.

• ProfVal uses AI under rigorous human oversight. Every document is heavily adapted by a trained writer. AI assists the process. It does not own it.

This article is informational and does not constitute legal advice.

AI Is Ubiquitous

As of 2026, 100% of Fortune 500 companies use AI in some form, and 94% of companies worldwide use it in at least one business function.

ProfVal uses AI to assist with research, to identify where our services may be weak, and as a tool to support our team. Our affiliate, ImmiBlocks, offers AI-assisted cover letter drafting grounded in uploaded case documents and reviewed by trained writers. Used responsibly, AI makes good teams more productive.

AI is useful when it sits inside a process built by people who know what they’re doing. It becomes a liability when it becomes the process.

The business world has tested over-reliance, and the results are instructive. A Forrester report found that 55% of employers who replaced workers with AI regret that decision, and 32% have already rehired for the same roles. Klarna celebrated replacing 700 customer service agents with AI, then rehired those roles after customer satisfaction collapsed. Ford rehired 350 veteran engineers because their institutional knowledge was not captured in AI training data. AI completes tasks, often effectively. It does not complete jobs that require judgment.

AI Is Not an Attorney, and Every AI Tool Tells You So

Every major AI platform explicitly states that its output is not legal advice, even when it feels like it is.

An immigration attorney understands current adjudication trends, RFE patterns, and how to frame a legal argument that holds up under scrutiny. Attorneys assess what is likely to motivate an adjudicator’s decision, how evidence will be weighed as a whole, and how competing considerations should be balanced. AI may identify isolated strengths, but it cannot replicate the legal judgment required to evaluate the totality of the record. This matters particularly now, where EB-2 NIW approval rates have dropped from about 95% in FY 2022 to below 40% in late 2025. A petition that would have succeeded with modest preparation three years ago now requires precise legal framing and evidentiary depth. AI will tell you your strengths, but not necessarily what you need to know.

While we are not attorneys, we can refer you to a law firm.

AI Will Tell You What You Want to Hear

AI tools are designed to be encouraging. Upset users stop being paying customers, so AI is purposely sycophantic. In most contexts this causes little harm. In immigration, it can be dangerous.

When a petitioner asks whether they have a strong case, AI will find reasons to agree. It will connect credentials to the Dhanasar framework at a surface level and produce language that sounds authoritative. What it will not do is flag that the proposed endeavor is too generic, that contributions have not been meaningfully distinguished, or that the national importance argument would not survive USCIS scrutiny.

AI tools operate like a sycophant. They support your arguments, validate your goals, and tell you why what you’re doing is right. In an immigration context, that means they consistently overstate your probability of success.

AI also hallucinates. We use that word specifically: AI will generate confident-sounding statements that are factually wrong or made up.  

We have reviewed petitions from prospective clients who used AI to build their own cases and shared documents that misstated visa requirements, exaggerated credentials in ways that were not supportable, and described proposed endeavors that were, at best, implausible. Attorneys talk about how AI can make up case law.

Among those that clearly self-petitioned, this is more common than might be expected.

We do not accept these petitioners as clients. If we do not believe the documents, USCIS probably will not

either. Perhaps more worrying is that many petitioners probably do not realize what they have submitted.

AI “Improvements” May Not Be Improvements

When you ask AI to improve a business plan or expert opinion letter, it will make the language more polished and the claims more expansive. What it will not do well is assess whether the expanded claims are accurate, whether they align with the attorney’s legal strategy, or whether they create inconsistencies or inflated assertions that a USCIS adjudicator will identify.

AI will “improve” the Declaration of Independence if you ask it to. It will do the same with a religious book of worship or a Pulitzer prize-winning book. It will likewise “improve” your expert opinion letter or business plan. The question is whether ‘improved’ is an improvement.

Why AI Should Not Draft an Expert Opinion Letter

The name says it all: an Expert Opinion Letter is the expert’s opinion. It must reflect the independent professional judgment of a credentialed expert who has personally reviewed the petitioner’s credentials and proposed endeavor. That means the expert must be able to stand behind the letter as their own.

Similarly, the letter cannot be adapted after it is sent. Experts must have final say in anything that has their name on it.

This matters beyond ethics. USCIS occasionally contacts experts directly to verify their qualifications and confirm that the letter reflects their actual assessment.

Why AI Should Not Replace an Expert-Produced Professional Plan or Business Plan

ProfVal has developed professional plans and business plans for thousands of petitioners. Over that time, our team has accumulated internal knowledge, refined through continuous feedback from immigration attorneys, about what works and what does not under current adjudication standards.

That knowledge is private. It is not published, not scraped by AI tools, and not reproducible by any system trained on public data.

Clients occasionally share with us plans produced by AI, including from companies that market themselves specifically as AI business plan generators. These plans share consistent weaknesses: they are overly optimistic, financially unrealistic, misrepresent clients’ intent, and written in the encouraging approach that AI defaults to. Critically, they typically lack the contextual elements that matter for immigration purposes, including the connection between the proposed endeavor and documented U.S. national priorities, the framing of the petitioner’s qualifications against the relevant legal standard, and the evidentiary depth that USCIS expects.

When clients ask us to adapt plans they produced, we almost always restart from scratch. The structural problems are deep enough that revision takes more time than building correctly from the beginning. A plan that sounds confident but is built on generic claims and unrealistic projections does not become a credible immigration document through editing.

It becomes a slightly more polished version of the same problem.

What This Means for Petitioners and Attorneys

ProfVal works with petitioners who attest that they have legal representation. Every document, including expert opinion letters, professional plans, and business plans, undergoes heavy adaptation by a trained writer with experience across hundreds of cases. Our approach to AI has been developed through rigorous testing and continues to be refined based on USCIS feedback.

AI assists our writers (trained humans). It isn’t the process.

If you are an attorney evaluating documentation providers, the right question is not whether they use AI, but who is responsible for what the document says. If you are a petitioner, the right question is whether the document you are submitting reflects a genuine expert’s genuine assessment of your specific case. That standard matters more than it ever has.

Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice. ProfVal is not a law firm.