At American University’s Kogod School of Business, students studying the art of negotiation are getting some help from artificial intelligence.
For the past year and a half, Workplace Diplomacy professor Alexandra Mislin has increasingly incorporated artificial intelligence into her courses each semester. Specifically, she is coaching students on how to use AI chatbots to prepare for and practice negotiations large and small—both for current situations they face now and situations they may encounter later in their business and careers. Every student in the school has access to Perplexity Pro, and she uses ChatGPT, even creating a custom GPT to develop her negotiation skills that she continues to tweak and improve.
“I want my students to think about how these tools can help them prepare for negotiations, how they can help them practice negotiating, and how they can support them when they get stuck in a negotiation,” she said. “It might be for that bigger moment, but a lot of times it’s all the steps leading up to that moment.”
Many students have jobs or internships outside of the classroom, so Mislin encourages them to use artificial intelligence to track strategies or important interactions where they arise. At the same time, they can also let the chatbot know about the broader goals they are trying to achieve, such as getting an offer for a full-time position at the end of the internship. Altogether, this gives students ongoing visibility into how day-to-day negotiations—conversations that build and lead to greater opportunities—are going so they can better strategize to achieve their goals.
Another exercise has students use AI to prepare for a specific negotiation, whether real (like a job negotiation) or hypothetical (like a major business deal or merger). They can talk about their arguments, assumptions they may have made, aspects of the situation they may have overlooked, the pros and cons of responding differently, and ask for feedback – similar to the way some companies do Today, executives are urging AI to provide feedback and expose their logic. Taking it a step further, students can use AI to practice negotiations, giving chatbots roles and actually demonstrating different scenarios.
“[With AI]they can be assigned to more adversaries — other hypothetical adversaries besides the people in the classroom,” she said, referring to the traditional practice of randomly assigning students to engage in simulated negotiations with each other. “In the past sometimes they were able to negotiate with students from other universities or other cultures, but now you can simulate quite a few situations.”
This complements traditional approaches to teaching negotiation skills, which include learning the theories behind human behavior and interaction, facilitating simulated negotiations among students, and analyzing the objective outcomes and subjective feelings of these negotiations. But Mislin does see unique advantages that she believes AI can offer, particularly in its ability to mirror students’ negotiation strategies and provide targeted feedback (she makes clear that they should be evaluated using critical thinking, and that AI won’t always get it right).
“Finding where your assumptions are lacking, putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, thinking about where you’re missing questions or curiosities — I think (artificial intelligence) really helps a lot with that,” she said.