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Adapting to New Negotiation Technology

30 adapting to new negotiation technology

Keld Jensen is seeing more and more companies close to coming up with a negotiation tool based on AI. Technology speeding up will be another outcome of coronavirus. It’s coming quicker than ever before. Tedious and boring parts of negotiation will and are being automated. Those that buy millions of something multiple times a year could be offloading that task to software that can do it better.

Pactum AI

Pactum AI is a negotiation platform that allows purchases of products to be able to buy a product repeatedly with multiple negotiations happening at the same time. Typically, a category manager handles one segment, and their negotiations are handled sequentially. This platform can do multiple negotiations in parallel—all done on AI. They can achieve results at scale faster than you could without the negative bias humans have going into the conversation. This is the reality of negotiation.

IntelleXt

IntelleXt is an AI that combines contract negotiation with AI. They claim to have a system that is reading you as a person. They can study your email and social platforms to create a profile on you. So when you negotiate with someone, you can know who they are, what they believe, and what they’re interested in based on social media interaction and combine it with the negotiation platform.

Crystal Knows

Crystal Knows can be used as a Google plugin, and it predicts a person’s personality and communication profile based on their online habits and behavior. It then gives you cues to help you structure the conversation with them (based on the DiSC framework). It can help suggest how to structure the conversation, start a pitch, what to talk about, etc. It’s a great way to approach people differently.

The speed of change

The ability to adapt to new technology quickly is going to be something many companies will have to embrace. When you’re implementing new technology, the biggest issue is utilization. The people that can adapt the fastest will be the most successful. How can you become more adaptable? How do you think differently to adapt faster?

Keld thinks that it depends on the situation. If he were in a typical procurement position, you’d have to rethink the position you’re in. You might have to switch from being an operational procurement officer to a strategic one. You must focus more on negotiation. Keld is finding that procurement people aren’t negotiating. They’re looking at spreadsheets, comparing notes and proposals, and then clicking on the one with the lowest price.

That’s not advanced negotiation work. It’s not generating value—it’s just getting a good price. That group of people might have a difficult time in the future. Technology will replace them in 5 minutes. If you want to stay in the field, you need to focus on the social part of negotiation.

Technology won’t replace human beings in important negotiations (yet). Ask yourself: Do I actually like negotiations? If so, you can get good at it. If the answer is “no,” stop doing it. You won’t be good at it.

A challenge to my listeners: What tools do you have available right now? Zoom, Teams, etc. How can you utilize Clubhouse or AI? In what ways can we leverage technology to your benefit and make it easier to pick up? How do we make it more fun? It can be overwhelming and burdensome. But we need to find ways to make it feel like an opportunity. Send me a message on LinkedIn or text me #Negotiation at 587-315-5948 with your ideas!

To hear more from Keld about the future of negotiation, listen to episode #213 of the Negotiations Ninja podcast!