At American University’s Kogod School of Business, students learning the art of negotiating are getting a little help from AI.
Over the past year and a half, Alexandra Mislin, professor of workplace diplomacy, has been incorporating AI into her curriculum increasingly each semester. Specifically, she’s guiding students in how to use AI chatbots to prepare for and practice negotiations big and small—both for current circumstances they’re facing now and situations they may encounter later on in business and in their careers. Every student at the school has access to Perplexity Pro, and she’s tapped ChatGPT as well, even creating a custom GPT for building negotiation skills that she continues to tweak and improve.
“I want my students to think about how these tools can help them to prepare for a negotiation, how they can help them practice their negotiations, and how they can support them when they’re stuck in negotiations,” she said. “It could be for that bigger moment, but a lot of times, it’s all the steps leading up to it.”
Many of the students have jobs or internships outside of the classroom, so Mislin encourages them to use AI to track strategic or important interactions that come up for them. At the same time, they can also keep the chatbot informed of the broader objective they’re trying to achieve, such as getting an offer for a full-time role at the end of the internship. Together, this allows students to keep a running tab of how everyday negotiations—the sort of conversations that build and lead to bigger opportunities—are unfolding, so they can better strategize to achieve their goals.
Another exercise involves having students use AI to prepare for a specific negotiation, either real, like a job negotiation, or hypothetical, like a major business deal or merger. They can talk through their argument, assumptions they may be making, aspects of the situation they may be overlooking, the pros and cons of responding in different ways, and ask for feedback—similar to how some corporate executives today are prompting AI to offer feedback and poke holes in their logic. Taking it a step further, students can use AI to practice negotiating, giving the chatbot personas and actually playing out different scenarios.
“[WIth AI], they can be assigned to more counterparts—other hypothetical counterparts than the people in the classroom,” she said, referring to the traditional practice of randomly assigning students to do mock negotiations with each other. “Sometimes in the past, they’ve been able to negotiate with students at other universities or in other cultures, but now you can simulate a fair amount of that.”
This is all in addition to the traditional approach for teaching negotiation techniques, which includes learning theories behind human behavior and interactions, facilitating mock negotiations among students, and analyzing both objective results and subjective feelings about those negotiations. But Mislin does see benefits she believes AI can uniquely offer, in particular AI’s ability to hold a mirror up to a student’s negotiation strategies and offer targeted feedback (which she does make clear they should evaluate with critical thinking, and that AI is not always right).
“Finding where your assumptions fall short, putting yourself into the shoes of the other party, considering where you are missing questions or curiosity—I think [AI] really does help a lot with that,” she said.
