Artificial Intelligence, Not Artificial Wisdom – What Delina Yasmeh Taught Me About AI and Expertise

I’ve spent a lot of hours building Claude Code workflows that turn a podcast transcript into articles. When I first started, the output looked great and read well, and then I caught the problem. As I told Delina Yasmeh on Unscripted Small Business, “it invented parts of the conversation with the guests that didn’t exist.” The writing was fluent. It just wasn’t true.

So when Delina, a business and tax attorney and the founder of DELINA.ESQ in Los Angeles, told me AI has made her more necessary, not less, I knew exactly what she meant. Here’s what I’m taking from the conversation.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Castos.

It’s artificial intelligence, not artificial wisdom

That’s the line I landed on during the episode, and I’m going to keep using it. The tools are impressive. They are not Data from Star Trek or Jarvis from the Marvel movies, with some extra layer that fact-checks you or catches what you missed. I said on the show that “most AI programs are set up to be yes men.” Their job is to give you an answer. An answer isn’t the same as a right one.

Where people get hurt is when they treat the software like a person. It’s math picking the most likely next word from what it was trained on. If you hand it a task and assume it has judgment, you’ll get sloppy work with confident formatting. Dr. Christiane Schroeter made a similar point when she told me your AI is a yes man, and it’s worth reading next to this.

Delina agreed, and she put it in a lawyer’s terms. “This is not wisdom.” It’s a tool, and “it is not an entity, it is not your coworker.”

AI made Delina more necessary, not less

Delina has done more than a thousand consultations with business owners, and she keeps hearing the same question: has AI made it so people don’t want or need lawyers? Her answer is the opposite.

“If anything, it’s made it so that I am more necessary.”

People send her contracts they drafted with AI. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single AI drafted contract that has been good,” she said, and she tells some clients “I would rather you have a handshake and nothing on paper than what this is saying.” A bad draft doesn’t just fail to help. In her view it creates more issues and more liability.

Her firm uses AI every day, and she says “it is absolutely necessary.” She also told me a story that I keep coming back to. She dictates her emails with AI but reads every contract herself. Five rounds into a negotiation, the attorney on the other side changed the terms entirely and wrote that he hadn’t changed anything, apparently betting she wasn’t reading. “I caught it in two seconds.” That’s the whole lesson for me. Use AI to save the typing. Don’t use it to skip the reading.

It’s the same thing Maya Weinreb taught me about my own bookkeeping: you have to know enough to check the work. Delina’s version: “you need to make sure that whatever it is you’re doing with AI, you know it in and out yourself.”

The shared SOP is what makes AI repeatable

I told Delina about a guest of mine who works with Oleno. His point was that one person who knows what they’re doing can set up their own AI to handle a task well. But if you don’t take the extra time to set up everyone else’s with the right prompts and “the right shared SOP,” then “you’ll get radically different results.” Telling a team they can just go use AI for that isn’t a process.

That’s what fixed my transcript problem. Not a better model, but chained prompts with rules written down, so the process runs the same way each time and gets checked against the source.

Delina has been doing the same thing in her firm. She said she’s spent “a year and a half with my team working on the back end” to get her AI to give her the answers and context she needs, and they’re still “constantly checking, rechecking, and making adjustments.” A year and a half, with a team, and still adjusting. If you set up your AI workflow last month and stopped checking it, that should give you pause. Matthew Fornaro told me something close to this about running a lean firm: AI replaced his overhead, not his judgment.

I asked her what a book built from interviews would need

Near the end, I asked Delina a question for my own reasons: if someone took a person’s interviews and turned them into a book, what would it need before it went out? Her answer was a disclaimer, and she didn’t leave room for interpretation. It would need to be “very, very clear that this is not specific legal and business advice. It is general advice.”

I followed up about other kinds of experts, like someone who talks about leadership. She said “the legal is much, much, much more stringent,” with accounting and financial advice close behind, and leadership is broader. Either way, she’d want a disclaimer that covers all of it, and on her own posts, “we always have the disclaimer in there.” She doesn’t want to “ever unintentionally create an attorney-client relationship” with someone who reads or listens to her.

I took that literally. It’s why the box at the top of this post exists, and why it’s going on everything we publish from this episode. If you write about what experts tell you, and I do every week, it’s worth asking whether your reader could mistake a conversation for advice.

What I’m taking from Delina Yasmeh on AI and expertise

One more thing hit close to home. When I started freelancing and stopped having a W-2, I became a business by default, without ever deciding whether I was building something to sell, keep or pass on. Brandon Moon had told me you should know your end game before you start, and Delina agreed: “You need to understand where you’re going so you can get to where you want to be.” Her version of planning is a two-to-three-year direction while “bookending the weeks, the months, and the quarters,” and staying ready to “adjust and be flexible.”

So here’s my short list:

1. Call it what it is. Artificial intelligence, not artificial wisdom. It answers. It doesn’t judge.
2. Read what it hands you. Let AI save the typing, and do the reading yourself.
3. Write the SOP down. A shared process beats everyone running their own version.
4. Know your field cold. You can only catch mistakes in work you understand.
5. Put the disclaimer where people will see it. General conversation isn’t advice, so say so.

For the full episode recap, read Delina Yasmeh on AI contracts, tax changes and preparing to scale on Unscripted Small Business, and for the agency angle, Delina Yasmeh on AI liability and client contracts on SEO Arcade. Delina answers recurring business questions in general terms in her law library, posts as Delina Esquire on Instagram and YouTube, and is on LinkedIn.

Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.