AI in Negotiation: How to Use It and How to Prepare to Face It

The rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the business landscape in big ways. As of October 2026, 1 in 5 U.S. workers now use AI in their job, according to Pew.

Whether you are pro AI or against it, we still need to ensure that we understand what best practices may look like as negotiators. Understanding how AI can be utilized by your own team, and how it may be adopted by other parties, will be crucial in keeping you at the forefront of the negotiation game.

Exactly how established negotiation principles translate into this new era still remains to be seen, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t begin to explore what good practices look like now. Let’s take a look at how to use AI in negotiation, and the plan you can make if you think it is being used by an opposing party.

We are negotiation experts, not AI experts, so always remember to use your own discernment when adopting AI tools in your organization. Create official policies and governance, and have clear guidance around when AI can and cannot be used.

Using AI in Negotiation

When exploring the various AI tools available on the market now, you may discover that some of them could be put to use within your own negotiations. If so, you need to think carefully about how exactly you want to use them.

AI negotiation agents may seem like the stuff of sci-fi, but a bot that is capable of negotiating on your behalf might not offer the right options for you. In fact, you may not even want to hand over that much control to an AI, instead preferring to still keep the actual art of bargaining within your skillset. Here are some of the ways AI can support and improve negotiation processes without taking the negotiator out of it.

Conduct Research

One of the most powerful ways you can utilize AI tools in your negotiation practices is through research. Here at Scotwork, we are constantly putting emphasis on your prep work. If you want to chase certain negotiation outcomes, preparation helps you lay the road to get there.

We all know research takes time. AI can help cut that down. With the right prompts and access to relevant sources, an AI tool can speed up the gathering of useful background or contextual information. Whether you are building a case last minute or you just want to be more efficient in your processes, AI can help you find the right information you need and fast.

Of course, remember that you will need to fact-check anything it gives you. It could be very embarrassing if you show up to a negotiation with the wrong research or information to present and could very much put you on the back foot.

Compile Research, Data, and Proposals

So much information can go into crafting a good negotiation proposal. If you are pulling information from your own research, from data gathered from other reports, from information in your own company’s knowledge base, you can be faced with lots of parts from multiple sources that all need sorting into a format you can actually work with.

This is where AI can come in. By giving it access to the data and information you have collected, it can transform your notes into the beginning of a working strategy. Rather than spend hours sorting through data for a link or a hook that you can build your argument around, let AI do the heavy lifting for you.

Before entering negotiation material into an AI tool, make sure its use complies with your organization’s AI, privacy, confidentiality, and information-security policies.

Note-Taking

When you are in the thick of negotiating, you may neglect your note-taking. However, when it comes to reviewing the session afterwards, you may discover there are some gaps in your memory, and you now don’t have the notes to fill them in.

AI note-takers are becoming ever more prominent across the world of business, and they are especially helpful during negotiations, as they allow you to stay in the moment and focused on the conversation at hand. You can then refer to the notes and negotiation transcripts afterward to ensure that everything has been properly recorded.

As a show of good faith, you may also wish to share your notes with the other party in the negotiations. This can help increase transparency and ensure that everything has been correctly recorded, as they can amend the notes themselves or include their own.

Before using an AI note-taker, consider confidentiality, data protection, company policy, and any consent or notification requirements that apply. Both parties should also understand how the recording or transcript will be stored and used.

Drafting

AI can be used to create a quick first draft of any materials you need. From emails to proposals, there is a wide range of materials that can be first crafted with the help of an AI tool. Doing so can give you structure and key phrasing from the beginning, so even when you go on to refine it further, you can ensure that the key message is there from the beginning.

You must remember that AI should only be used for drafting and not for the final message that is sent to other parties. If a human’s eyes have not been across it, don’t even think about sending it. This is especially true for legal documents and final offers. If Legal hasn’t had the chance to look it over, it should not be getting sent elsewhere.

Use AI for the first draft, and then bring real human expertise in to fix and refine it.

Testing Negotiation Scenarios

If you want to follow a specific strategy during a negotiation, but you aren’t sure what the outcome could be, you could use AI to test your theories. By giving the tool the data and context of the scenario, you could ask it to run through possible outcomes, both positive and negative, and the actions that you could take as a result of each of those outcomes.

Granted, one Reddit user writes,

“Testing and having it run a scenario with win conditions generated for them in addition to ones I’ve asked it to have but kept secret from me until the end of negotiation. That has been useful to make it feel more natural as you’re not negotiating on a few issues and you won’t know everything the other party may want”

Whether the scenario is purely fictional or a future one you wish to explore, you need to remember that anything the AI predicts is not set in stone. However many scenarios it can imagine, it cannot accurately predict how the other party would behave. Use this scenario testing as a chance to explore potential negotiation outcomes and learn how you would react to them, so you can become more proficient at coping with sudden changes and unfavorable outcomes during real negotiations.

Encountering AI in Negotiation

So, what do you do if you think the other party in your negotiation is using AI as part of their strategy? If they are using it for preparation, as you are, then you can still expect to see and speak with a human when it comes to the real negotiation process. However, if you find yourself face-to-face with an AI agent, potentially to speed things along to final offers, you will still be able to turn things to your advantage.

Understand AI Agents

You don’t have to be an expert on AI. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to understand AI.

AI agents may operate within objectives, constraints, and approval limits set by the organization deploying them. You may not know exactly what those are, but questioning the agent and observing how it responds can help you understand what appears to be flexible and what is not. Just as negotiators learn to interpret the behavior of the person across the table, we may increasingly need to understand how AI systems respond to different proposals and questions.

Be Clear on Your Position

With any negotiation, you have to establish your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) before proceedings begin. This holds true even for negotiations with AI. By anchoring your position firmly and early, you create a foundation that the rest of the negotiation can move from.

Don’t make concessions simply because the system continues to push back. Look for opportunities to trade rather than simply conceding value without receiving something in return.

Take Your Time

If you are negotiating with an AI agent, don’t automatically assume it has complete authority over the final outcome. Try to establish what decisions it can make, what sits outside its remit, and when human approval is required. Everything will have its due process, and that includes the negotiation itself.

Therefore, you need to treat this negotiation as you would any other. Do your prep work, create a strong argument, and don’t accept speed as a substitute for scrutiny. Ask questions to gain a full overview of the AI’s constraints, and take the time to evaluate any proposal given to you based on its true merit, regardless of whether it comes from a bot or a human.

Has AI Actually Been Used in Negotiation So Far?

You might leave this article wondering if the next time you try negotiation, you will be facing a bot. This isn’t the reality just yet, but there is some interesting research being done in this area that is worth paying attention to.

In February 2025, MIT ran an international AI negotiation competition to look more into the strategies used by AI agents. Drawing participants from over 40 countries and involving more than 180,000 negotiations, a key insight emerged. Warmth helped the AI agents reach deals, while dominance helped them claim more value. Agents who were instructed to remain warm throughout conversations were more likely to keep the conversation going.

Meanwhile, researchers at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) have also been exploring what dialog agents capable of negotiation are able to do. Agents were asked to help divide a pool of items between themselves. Those that held longer conversations with the human researchers took more considered time to accept their deals. Some even feigned interest in items to then “compromise” and concede them later in the negotiation. They were not trained to do the latter, and yet this is a real technique some negotiators do use.

These are fascinating developments that show how AI agents can be used to mimic human behaviors in the negotiation process. We have so much to explore in this area, but there is plenty of scope for doing so.

Will AI Replace Human Negotiators?

Negotiation dynamics are incredibly nuanced. Will negotiators be replaced by two bots arguing with each other until a final offer is sent to their human colleagues? We are in no position to say. However, getting to grips with AI-assisted negotiations now, while technology is still emerging, gives you and your organization a chance to establish strategies and game plans early.

An AI can’t currently negotiate in exactly the same way a human can. So much of human-led negotiation is bound up in ethical conduct, interpersonal skills, and the skill to pivot from one strategy to another.

Some of the most practical uses of AI currently lie in negotiation research and preparation. By learning how to use prompts for research and creating knowledge bases, you stand to improve your productivity in preparing for negotiation while also freeing your time to focus on improving the strengths and weaknesses of your other skills.

Hone Your Human Skills With Scotwork

Artificial intelligence might change how we prepare for negotiation or even how we handle opening arguments and proposals. So long as there are still humans interacting with each other during negotiations, there will be a need for training and exercises to ensure we are communicating with each other and advocating for our parties in the best possible manner.

No matter how much or how little you use AI within your negotiations, you need to ensure that your own skills stay fresh. Scotwork’s courses and training can help you develop new skills and improve the old, ensuring that you stay at the top of your game. Get in touch with Scotwork today, and find out more about how we can help you manage and improve your negotiation skills.