Do you use AI as a strategic tool in negotiation?
Sixty-five per cent said yes. When we dug deeper, almost all of them were doing the same thing: personal preparation. Research, background reading, faster data.
Then we asked how they negotiate. On a scale from “claiming value” to “creating value,” the average score was 7.4 out of 10.
Interestingly, that result contrasts with the practical exercises we conducted during the keynote. A powerful illustration of the performance gap, the gap between knowing and doing, between preached and practiced behavior in our negotiations – well documented in research.
The gap between intention and behaviour
Negotiators consistently rate themselves as more collaborative, more fair, and more integrative than the evidence supports. This isn’t a character flaw, it’s a structural feature of how humans experience conflict. We perceive our own intentions (which are often genuinely oriented toward value creation) and judge others by their behavior (which we read as more competitive than our own).
Research on egocentric biases in negotiation, including the widely cited work of Thompson and Loewenstein on self-serving interpretations of fairness, shows that even professional negotiators tend to recall information that favors their own position and evaluate proposed settlements in ways that systematically benefit themselves, often without realising it.
What makes this particularly relevant for procurement is the structural context. KPIs measured on cost savings, the adversarial framing of “buyer vs. supplier,” tight timelines. All of these channel behavior toward value-claiming, regardless of how collaborative a professional’s intentions might be. You can believe you’re creating value while still anchoring hard, resisting information exchange, and making single-issue concessions in sequence. That is still distributive negotiation, even when done warmly.
A 7.4 average in a room full of procurement professionals is – at least in part – a measure of aspiration, not behavior.
Prof. Dr. Katia Tieleman
What value creation actually requires
The Harvard Program on Negotiation draws a clear distinction between distributive bargaining – competing over a fixed amount of value – and integrative bargaining, which seeks to expand what’s available before dividing it. The shift is not about being nicer or more accommodating. It requires specific, often counterintuitive behaviors: proactively sharing information about priorities, asking questions to understand the other side’s interests, making multi-issue offers, thinking divergently and separating idea generation from evaluation.
These behaviors are rare in practice, even when negotiators believe they are being integrative. What appears to be a purely distributive negotiation is often integrative beneath the surface – multiple issues exist, tradeoffs are possible – but neither side explores them because both are playing the game they expect the other to be playing.
Our keynote audience confirmed this. When asked what keeps them from truly shaping the game, 65% cited organisational culture and 48% cited a limited mandate. Only 23% named knowledge and skills as a barrier. Most people don’t see capability as their problem. They blame the context. That, too, is a bias worth examining.
The AI illusion and the missing level
The AI question revealed something structurally important. Of 144 professionals, 94 use AI for personal preparation and support. Just 9 have moved to the next level: delegating tasks or actively letting AI inform their strategy.
This tracks precisely with the open answers to “what is AI’s biggest opportunity in negotiation?” Participants overwhelmingly described what they already do – faster research, better data, smarter preparation – and called it the opportunity.
The ceiling of their current experience became their vision of the future.
Prof. Dr. Katia Tieleman
A 2025 HBR article by Revilla and Saenz from the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics describes a very different frontier: AI systems capable of autonomous supplier negotiations, continuous risk monitoring, and real-time deal support. The gap between where most procurement professionals are using AI and where the technology already operates is not incremental. It is categorical.
But here is the deeper point: AI used only for preparation is AI in service of the same game. It makes you faster at researching a position you already hold. It doesn’t challenge you to question whether the game itself needs redesigning.
The mandate trap
The most cited barrier in the keynote data – organizational culture, 65 responses – points to something I identify as one of the central obstacles to real negotiation development: the mandate trap. Negotiators are handed a script and a ceiling, and they optimise within it. They become very good at playing a predefined game, and they mistake that proficiency for strategic thinking.
Research from HBR on negotiating with powerful suppliers makes a related argument: when the balance of power has shifted toward suppliers, buyers who try to win by applying more pressure typically make their position worse. The most effective move is to bring new value to the supplier: to change the game rather than play it harder.
This is not a negotiation tactic. It is a fundamentally different orientation: from position to interest, from short-term leverage to long-term alignment, from claiming a fixed pie to questioning whether the pie is fixed at all.
The question worth sitting with
The NQ® framework I have developed is built on exactly this reorientation – onderhandelen omdenken, negotiation rethought from the ground up. Not a new set of techniques to deploy inside the same game, but a different way of seeing what negotiation is for.
The data from this keynote suggests that most procurement professionals are skilled players of a game that may not be the right – futureproof – game. They prepare well, they use their tools, they anchor and concede and close. And they score themselves 7.4 on value creation.
The question is not whether you intend to create value. The question is:
What would you have to change – in your preparation, your conversations, your mandate, your measures – for that intention to become visible to the person across the table and in the results negotiated?
