How to (and how not to) use AI in negotiation

This is an important topic; I see leaders leveraging AI in negotiations the wrong way all the time. The good news is, there are several ways you can leverage AI effectively, and several ways in which AI won’t help at all. It’s vital to know the difference. 

 

 

How to use AI in negotiations effectively

 

Use it to formulate your negotiation preparation

Use AI to understand the blind spots in your negotiation. For every negotiation, I use the Magnetic Negotiator Coach to evaluate negotiations across the Magnetic Influence Framework (Meaningful Impact, Authenticity, G3, Networking Superconnector, Trust, Intuition, Connection).

 

Give AI full context and the background

View AI like a colleague or external consultant and treat it as such. This means making sure you give AI the full information and don’t hold anything back. Let it access your workspace so it can provide accurate answers and improved recommendations.

 

Leverage AI as your negotiation coach

AI is a fantastic way to stress test your thinking before you enter the negotiation room, giving you a no-stakes environment to ensure your strategy is as strong as it can be. Ask the AI to simulate different personas to practice with ahead of time. This is a strategy that can have powerful results; for example, 78% of professionals who used AI to prepare for job salary negotiations felt more confident.

 

Use AI to expand the options

Ask AI to identify blind spots in your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA), expand on creative options, and identify ways to add value to the other party that you might be missing. Have it analyse the other party’s business for headwinds and tailwinds, then identify areas that are high value to them but low value to you—valuable concessions you can keep in your pocket to trade during the negotiation. Ask it to review your long-term company strategy and map the elements of the deal against your strategic priorities, such as product enhancement, market expansion, revenue growth, supplier dependence, net operating margin, marketing, and competitiveness. 

 

The more access you give the intelligence, the more insight it can provide. For example, if the AI can access your complete deal book, it can compare the current opportunity against both your historical deals and those in your pipeline, assess how it stacks up, and recommend next steps. The advantage of AI is that it can conduct this analysis in near real time, giving you the speed, transparency, and confidence to move forward. Another study by the Harvard Program on Negotiation (PON) found that AI also helps negotiators identify common ground by analysing patterns across hundreds of negotiations in real time.

 

Use multiple LLMs

Advanced negotiation experts and leaders don’t rely on only one LLM for answers. Instead, they fact-check, evaluate, and prompt multiple LLMs to find the best path forward. Each model brings a different perspective, and comparing their outputs helps identify blind spots, validate assumptions, and uncover opportunities that a single model may miss.

 

 

What not to do with AI in negotiations

 

Don’t outsource the actual negotiation to the AI

There’s a tendency to think that negotiating over email rather than in person is the right way to handle the negotiation. The problem is that negotiating using the ‘least time-consuming’ or ‘most convenient’ medium is not best. However, just because the technology exists doesn’t mean you should use it. Not conducting the negotiation yourself will lead to skill erosion. The hard truth is you are undermining your own value and contribution. Secondly, the negotiation relationship is formed with a human, and a human is making the ultimate decision. Building trust is critical to the long-term success of the deal.

 

Don’t forget the human qualities

In one advanced AI negotiation study, researchers found that across 180,000 agent-to-agent negotiations, those that produced the most favourable outcomes had exhibited the human trait of warmth. This shows even in the machine world, human negotiation theory is paramount to success. If you are rehearsing lines and dishing out comebacks to objections, you’re doing it wrong.

 

The goal is to become a skilled negotiator who can diffuse pressure and reduce the friction in the room. This comes from your own communication skills. Use AI as a coach but don’t lose the humanity. It’s your intuition that will know when to infuse humour into the negotiation, or weave in inverse charisma, and channel a higher vibration of possibility. AI can’t do this; only the human can read the room with this level of calibration.

 

Don’t hide the fact that you’re using AI

Research shows that in negotiations where both parties use AI, the total value claimed is greater than in situations where only one side or neither side uses AI. Using AI to help you create value and expand the size of the pie should be expected. It’s like using a spreadsheet to do analysis – everyone is using it. If fact, you can encourage the other party to use AI if they aren’t. It will help you both find ways to structure the deal in a way that works out better for all.

 

Don’t use AI as a crutch

Learn to trust your own gut instinct; this is more valuable than becoming a commodity. Your value increases when you can master both AI landscape fluency and the human connection required to negotiate economically sound deals.  Leaning to either extreme will leave you behind and struggling. It’s now the world of a new professional archetype, that of the hybrid negotiator.

 

The important factor here to note is that human judgement is the most vital skill you bring to the table. In the future, you will manage an AI agent that orchestrates multiple agents across the right LLMs for each specific task, creating higher ROI per hour and time to connect with the human making the ultimate decision. 

 

 

An increasingly digital world

Ultimately, the future is increasingly digital, and as model improvements compound, the way to ensure your own longevity is to become the master of both the human and AI worlds – the hybrid negotiator. Not either or, but both. Human + machine. Mastery of negotiation, influence and persuasion in order to build human connection is the most important skill set you should develop right now. 

 

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Tim Castle is a bestselling author, award-winning negotiation expert, performance coach and global speaker who helps leaders and sales professionals combine emotional intelligence and AI to close high-stakes deals and drive lasting success. His sixth book Magnetic Influence: How to negotiate and persuade in a disrupted world (Kogan Page) has recently been released.

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and PhonlamaiPhoto