Fixing Immigration With AI: How Alma Is Making Legal Services Faster, Smarter, and More Human
How AI Is Transforming Immigration Law: Inside Alma’s Approach
I recently sat down with Aizada Marat, founder and CEO of Alma, an Interplay portfolio company, for a conversation about AI, immigration law, and the future of professional services.
Aizada has a unique perspective on the immigration system. Originally from Kyrgyzstan, she experienced its challenges firsthand, including being deported from the United States twice and spending more than a year unable to work or travel because of an immigration attorney's mistake. After building a career in law at Cooley and later working at McKinsey, she decided to tackle the problem herself.
Alma combines experienced immigration attorneys with AI and technology to make legal services faster, more transparent, and more predictable. We talked about why immigration law is particularly well suited to AI, how technology can make legal services more human, and why access to skilled talent matters to America's ability to innovate.
Technology Makes Lawyers More Human
One of Aizada's most compelling ideas was that AI can make legal services more human, not less.
Immigration attorneys spend an enormous amount of time on administrative work: collecting documents, completing forms, assembling applications, and chasing down information. These tasks are necessary, but they aren't necessarily where an attorney's expertise creates the most value.
Alma uses AI and automation to take on much of that work, allowing its attorneys to focus on legal strategy, application quality, and advising clients.
The distinction is important. The opportunity isn't simply to replace expensive human labor with software. It's to make highly skilled professionals more effective by allowing them to spend more time doing what they're best at.
I think this is a broader lesson for AI entrepreneurs. In professional services, the most valuable applications of technology may be the ones that give people more time to exercise their judgment and expertise.
Turning Uncertainty Into Predictability
Immigration is a particularly difficult process because the stakes are so personal.
For an individual, a delayed application can affect the ability to work, travel, or make long-term plans. For a company, uncertainty around an employee's immigration status can complicate hiring and create real business costs.
Aizada explained that Alma approaches this problem across three dimensions: quality, speed, and transparency.
On quality, Alma uses anonymized data to identify patterns in government decisions and improve how applications are prepared. On speed, automation helps reduce the time spent on repetitive administrative tasks.
The third dimension is transparency. Alma's platform makes deadlines, responsibilities, and service-level commitments visible to clients. Companies can see where cases stand, who is responsible for the next step, and what needs to happen.
That may sound like a relatively simple improvement, but it's meaningful in a process where people often have little visibility into what's happening.
The broader opportunity is to make complex services feel manageable. Technology can't eliminate every source of uncertainty, but it can make the parts within a service provider's control much more predictable.
Where AI Will Disrupt Legal Services
We also discussed a question that applies well beyond immigration: Which parts of the legal industry are most vulnerable to AI disruption?
Aizada offered a useful way to think about it. The answer depends in part on the complexity of the work, the consequences of an error, and how much risk a client is willing to accept.
Immigration has characteristics that make it particularly well suited to technology-driven services. There are established procedures, repeatable workflows, and defined outcomes. While the legal work can be complex, much of the administrative process can be systematized.
Other areas of law present different challenges.
In major corporate transactions, M&A, and litigation, the stakes can be enormous. Clients aren't just paying for legal expertise. They're also paying for experience, reputation, and the ability to manage significant risk.
In those situations, an established law firm's brand and resources can function like an insurance policy. A company may be reluctant to trust a new provider with a matter that could fundamentally affect its business.
That doesn't mean AI won't change those areas. It means adoption will likely happen differently.
My takeaway is that the opportunity for AI isn't uniform across professional services. Entrepreneurs need to understand not just what technology can do, but where customers are willing to trust it—and what they need to see before they're comfortable making that shift.
The Founder Behind the Problem
One of the things I find interesting about Aizada's story is how directly her personal experience shaped the business.
She didn't enter immigration law because she identified an attractive market from the outside. She entered it because she'd experienced the consequences of a system that wasn't working well.
After studying law in the United States and working at Cooley, Aizada had the professional background to understand the legal process. But even as an attorney herself, she struggled to find reliable immigration representation.
That experience helped her recognize that the problem extended beyond individuals. Companies sponsoring employees faced many of the same challenges, from uncertainty around start dates to the administrative burden of managing multiple cases.
Alma was built to address both sides of that problem.
I think there's an important lesson here about founder-market fit. Personal experience doesn't automatically make someone the right person to build a company, but it can give them a depth of understanding that is difficult to replicate.
Aizada knew what the problem felt like as a client. Her legal and professional services background helped her understand how the system worked. She brought those perspectives together to build something new.
Immigration and the AI Talent Race
Our conversation eventually moved from legal technology to a much broader question: What role does immigration play in America's ability to innovate?
For companies building in AI and other technical fields, access to talent is a critical part of the equation. Aizada described how companies are increasingly thinking about immigration support as a way to attract and retain skilled employees.
Historically, immigration sponsorship was often associated with large technology companies. But Alma is seeing growing demand from earlier-stage businesses as well.
For a startup competing with much larger companies for talent, the ability to support an employee through the immigration process can matter. And for the employee, the quality and predictability of that support can have a meaningful impact on their life.
Aizada also pushed back on the idea that immigration is a single, undifferentiated issue. Her focus is on skilled immigration and the role it can play in addressing talent needs, particularly in technical fields.
The policy debate is complicated, but the business question is straightforward: if companies need specialized talent to build and compete, how effectively can they access it?
For Alma, improving the immigration process is one way to help companies and individuals navigate that challenge.
Fixing the System, Not Just the Service
When I asked Aizada what she'd change about the immigration system itself, she pointed to two opportunities: digitizing more of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) process and expanding premium processing to more application types.
Some immigration applications still require paper filings and physical mail. Aizada sees digitization as a way to make the system more efficient and create opportunities to integrate better technology.
She also believes expanding paid premium processing could give applicants more options for obtaining faster, clearer timelines.
These ideas reflect an important distinction. Alma can improve the quality and delivery of its own legal services, but it doesn't control the government processes those services depend on.
That creates two separate opportunities: modernize how legal services are delivered, and modernize the systems those services have to navigate.
The first is what Alma is building today. The second is a much larger challenge.
The Future of AI in Professional Services
Ultimately, that's what I took away from my conversation with Aizada.
Alma is an example of what happens when you combine deep industry expertise with technology and rethink how an established service should work.
The company isn't trying to eliminate lawyers. It's using AI to make them more effective. It's not eliminating the complexity of immigration law, but it's making the process easier for clients to understand and manage.
I think there's a broader lesson for founders building with AI. The opportunity isn't always to create an entirely new category or automate an entire profession. Sometimes it's to take an existing service, understand where the experience breaks down, and use technology to make it fundamentally better.
Aizada experienced the problem herself, built a deep understanding of it, and turned that experience into a company.
The question for entrepreneurs is: Where are people still dealing with unnecessary complexity—and what could you build to make that experience dramatically better?
Listen to the full conversation with Aizada Marat on Innovation with Mark Peter Davis to hear more about Alma, the future of AI in law, and the role of skilled immigration in America's innovation economy.
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