When Everyone Has the Same AI Prep, What Wins the Negotiation?

I’ve spent much of my career negotiating. Across sales, leadership and building businesses in different markets, I’ve seen deals succeed or fail for reasons that never appeared in the briefing document.

Someone had a concern they didn’t want to voice in front of their colleagues. A decision maker needed to feel confident they could defend the deal internally. A relationship had been damaged months earlier and nobody had addressed it.

You could have the best research in the room and still miss all of that.

That is why I wrote Magnetic Influence now.

When I wrote The Art of Negotiation, access to information could give you a real advantage. Today, AI can help almost anyone research a company, anticipate objections, compare options and draft a persuasive proposal before breakfast. I use it myself. It is an extraordinary preparation tool.

But if both sides arrive equally well prepared, what happens next?

When intelligence becomes abundant, influence becomes scarce.

By influence, I don’t mean having a clever line that makes someone say yes. I mean earning enough trust that they will tell you what is really going on. I mean recognising when your carefully prepared argument isn’t landing and having the judgment to stop talking.

Think about a client who says, “Your proposal is too expensive.”

An AI tool might give you five ways to defend the price. You could deliver every one of them beautifully and still lose the deal. Perhaps the client can afford it but fears being held responsible if it fails. Perhaps the budget belongs to another team.

Perhaps they have had a poor experience with a similar supplier and are testing whether you will listen.

I would ask, “Which part of the investment is hardest to justify?”

Then I would let them answer.

That question might reveal a problem you can actually solve. It might also reveal that there is no deal to be done on the current terms. Either way, you are closer to the truth.

This is where I think people get AI wrong in negotiation. They ask it to produce the perfect answer when they would be better served using it to prepare better questions.

I use AI to pressure test a position, explore what the other side might value and rehearse a difficult conversation. It can show me where my case is weak. It can help me see an option I had overlooked. Those are valuable capabilities, and I believe every serious negotiator should learn to use them.

But I would never hand over my judgment to it. AI cannot see a person hesitate before they say “fine.” It cannot know which part of a conversation has made someone defensive unless I tell it, and even then it only has my version of events. It can write a smooth follow-up email, but I still have to decide whether the words are true to me and to the relationship.

I’ve led commercial conversations across countries and cultures where the same sentence can land in very different ways. Preparation helps enormously. Curiosity helps you discover what preparation missed.

That is the heart of Magnetic Influence: use the tools available to become more capable, then bring your full attention to the person in front of you. In a difficult conversation, slow down. Listen for the concern beneath the stated position. Resist the urge to answer the first objection before you understand it.

You can try this in your very next negotiation. Before you make your next argument, ask:

“What matters most to you about the outcome, beyond the terms we’ve discussed?”

And give them room to answer properly.

You may discover a constraint you can work around, an opportunity neither side had considered, or a reason the deal is stuck. That discovery is where negotiation begins.

AI can help you walk into the room ready. What you do with the human being across from you is still up to you.