According to Fortune, at American University’s Kogod School of Business, professor Alexandra Mislin has been increasingly weaving AI into her negotiation curriculum over the past year and a half. Every student at the school has access to Perplexity Pro, and she also uses ChatGPT, even creating a custom GPT specifically for building negotiation skills. Her method guides students to use chatbots to prepare for, practice, and get unstuck in negotiations, both for immediate situations and future career challenges. She encourages them to use AI to track strategic daily interactions and keep the bot informed of broader goals, like securing a full-time job from an internship. The exercises range from prepping for real job offers to simulating major business deals, with AI acting as a counterpart or a critic to poke holes in their logic.
AI as the ultimate prep tool
Here’s the thing about negotiation training: it’s historically been resource-intensive. You need partners, you need scenarios, and you need a professor’s time for feedback. What Mislin is doing basically turns AI into a 24/7 sparring partner and strategy consultant. Students can talk through their arguments, uncover blind spots in their assumptions, and test responses—all before a single real-world word is exchanged. It’s like having a tireless, instant focus group for your pitch. And the part about keeping a “running tab” on everyday interactions is sneaky-smart. Most people don’t think of a casual chat with a manager as a negotiation, but those micro-interactions build the capital for the big ask. AI can help track that narrative over time, which is a level of strategic awareness that’s hard to maintain on your own.
The feedback loop and its limits
But let’s not get carried away. The most crucial part of Mislin’s approach, which the article highlights, is the insistence on critical thinking. AI can hold up a mirror, but it’s not always an accurate one. Its feedback is based on patterns in its training data, which can include biases, outdated norms, or simply generic advice that lacks nuance. Using it to “put yourself in the shoes of the other party” is fantastic in theory, but the AI’s conception of that other party is a statistical guess, not genuine empathy. So the real skill being taught isn’t just prompt engineering; it’s evaluation. It’s learning to use AI-generated feedback as a starting point for deeper analysis, not as a definitive answer. This is a meta-skill that applies far beyond the negotiation table, touching on how the AI is changing the CTO role and other leadership positions where decision-making under uncertainty is key.
Beyond the classroom simulation
The real promise is in scaling experience. As Mislin notes, you can simulate negotiations with a wider variety of “counterparts” than you could in a single classroom. Want to practice a deal with a hard-nosed, old-school manufacturing exec? Or a consensus-driven startup founder? You can prompt for that. This moves training from generic role-play toward targeted, scenario-specific practice. It also democratizes access to what was once a high-touch, expensive form of coaching. Now, any professional with a subscription can run drills. The question is, will this create a generation of negotiators who are over-reliant on synthetic interactions? Possibly. But if the foundational theory and human-centric analysis are still core to the curriculum—as they seem to be here—then AI becomes a powerful force multiplier, not a replacement.
