How to improve your negotiation skills at work using AI
🧠 AI-powered negotiation skills for product teams. Pay rises, stakeholder conflict and more. Knowledge Series #73.
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The ability to negotiate at work can mean the difference between getting a pay rise or not, deciding whether to choose one vendor over another and deciding on a path forward for a new feature.
But while humans are still at the centre of these types of negotiations, it is now possible to use AI to guide and enhance your negotiation skills at work. It was recently confirmed that AI was used during the UK’s negotiations with the EU, for example, where a clone of the British Prime Minister was used to help structure the negotiation process and predict how he might react in certain scenarios.
In this Knowledge Series, we’ll use the latest set of AI capabilities along with frameworks designed by Harvard University to boost your negotiation skills with a series of practical examples to lean on. Use Perplexity to structure a pay rise discussion, Gemini Pro to frame a third party API vendor negotiation and more.
Coming up:
How to use Perplexity, Grok, NotebookLM, Gemini and other tools to sharpen your negotiation skills
Principled negotiation explained - how to apply its framework with AI to structure your negotiation skills at work
Practical examples:
Make a decision about a new feature
Agree pricing with a vendor
Negotiate a pay rise
How to use visuals and interactive frameworks to guide your negotiation
Principled Negotiation Explained
Before we dig into some examples, to start off, we’ll use some frameworks designed by the Harvard Negotiation Project called principled negotiation and BATNA.
To understand the concept of principled negotiation, it helps to first consider the typical approach of positional negotiation. This means, 2 negotiating parties take 2, often opposing, positions and the goal of the negotiation is to meet in the middle somewhere.
In a positional bargaining approach, it’s often the ‘hardest’ party that wins; those who dig into their position, refuse to budge and apply pressure will beat those who yield to pressure, change position easily or accept one-sided losses to reach an agreement.
This is bad news for soft negotiators but thankfully there is an alternative way to negotiate using something called principled negotiation instead.
The 4 facets of principled negotiation
This methodology was created by a group known as the Harvard Negotiation Project whose primary focus was to gain a deeper understanding into the nature of negotiation practices.
According to the study, there are 4 facets which make up principled negotiation:
People - often when you’re negotiating, people and problems become entangled. People often become attached to their own problems and sometimes see the problem they’re tackling as an extension of their own personality.
Interests - in a negotiation context, there will always be shared and divergent interests. Shared interests are common to both parties, divergent interests are where the two parties disagree.
Options - in order to break a deadlock through negotiation, you’ll need to generate some options. AI can be particularly helpful here - especially since it externalizes the process of generating options - making it less likely that they’re perceived as any one person’s idea.
Criteria - when humans are involved in negotiating with each other, it’s almost inevitable that psychology and human emotion influence the direction of the negotiation. One way to combat this, is to ensure that your negotiation defers to using objective criteria wherever possible. Again, AI can help here.
When tackling a negotiation, it’s likely that you’ll lean on each of these 4 different facets in order to achieve a result that solves the problem you’re tackling. We’ll use this framework to guide some of our practical examples together along with some other tools.
Best next alternative (BATNA)
Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, is another concept in negotiation that refers to the most advantageous course of action a party can take if no agreement is reached. It serves as a benchmark to evaluate any proposed deal and strengthens a negotiator’s position by providing leverage and clarity.
More on principled negotiation and BATNA - Deep Research docs
If you want to learn more about how principled negotiation works, here’s some Deep Research reports from Gemini’s new Pro models and Grok on the topic.
Deep Research doc - Gemini Pro
Deep Research doc - Grok
Practical examples
Next, we’ll use these Deep Research docs as source materials to feed into our practical examples.
Example 1 - Make a decision about a new feature request
First up, let’s take a look at a pretty common use case in product-related work: dealing with feature requests. In this case, imagine a marketing exec comes to you and says “We need a new CRM”. This could be the trigger for a negotiation process.
