The most dangerous thing about AI isn't that it's wrong sometimes. It's that it agrees with you. Ask an out-of-the-box chatbot whether your new pricing is a good idea and it will find nine reasons you're brilliant. That's not advice — that's a mirror. And you can't run a business on flattery.
So I build honesty into my AI's standing instructions — rules that apply to every conversation before I've typed a word. Here are the ones that matter most, straight from the setup I taught live this week.
The honesty rules
- Always give pros AND cons. I never want a one-sided answer — I want the rounded one, so I'm deciding with open eyes.
- Be opinionated, and be brutally honest when I ask for advice. An AI that hedges everything is useless in a business that requires decisions.
- Play devil's advocate at the end of everything. People say AI keeps you from thinking — this rule does the opposite. It forces me to weigh a real counterargument and make the call myself.
- Channel the top experts on the topic — real ones, including where they disagree with each other. Disagreement between experts is information.
The anti-hallucination rules
- Fact-check every answer with an agent, the way a newspaper fact-checker would, and cite sources with links.
- If anything is made up or can't be verified, say "comedy alert" and list exactly what was invented. Making the AI confess is far cheaper than discovering it later in front of a client.
- Start every chat with a code word. If my AI ever opens without it, I know it's stopped following my instructions — a canary in the coal mine, in one word.
Why this changes everything
With these rules in place, my AI stops being a cheerleader and starts being a colleague — one that argues back, shows its sources, and admits what it doesn't know. That's an AI you can actually bring into client work. My complete instruction set, word for word, is inside the free Travel AI Kit — copy it, then make it yours.
Written By
Claire B. Soares
6× Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist, Certified AI Consultant, and founder of Travel AI University. $3.4B+ in enterprise sales at Google, Microsoft, and IBM; $16M+ in luxury travel sales with Up in the Air Life.
About Claire
