Increase your pay: Have AI check your manager's LinkedIn profile
According to Professor Keld Jensen, who holds a PhD in negotiation, you risk short-changing yourself if you don’t use AI to prepare for your pay negotiations. For example, you can use AI to create a DISC profile of your manager based on his or her LinkedIn profile.
The expert
Who: Keld Jensen
What: Professor with a PhD in negotiation from Arizona State University in the United States. Part-time lecturer at Aalborg University in Denmark. Author of the book 'The Smart Negotiator', which explores the use of AI in negotiations.
1. Use AI as a simulator
When a pilot is learning to fly, simulation is a major part of the training. When the pilot sits down in the simulator, it is to practice crash avoidance in a safe environment. You might experience a feeling of crashing if you are in the middle of pay negotiations and everything goes wrong.
Hence, you should use AI as your own simulation tool so that you are fully prepared for the negotiations.
In short, you upload all the information available to the system and ask it to play the role of your counterpart in a simulated salary review.
“You simply set up a test scenario, letting you experiment, take certain risks and try to negotiate,” explains Keld Jensen.
This will prepare you much better for your pay negotiations.
For the simulation to work optimally, it is important to use the right chatbots.
2. Choose the right chatbots
There are many different chatbots with their own unique capabilities. The best known is ChatGPT, which was the first OpenAI chatbot to be launched. You may also be familiar with Microsoft Copilot, which many people are required to use at work.
“Microsoft Copilot is actually one of the worst tools to use for the negotiation test,” says Keld Jensen.
Instead, he recommends the three chatbots: Claude Cowork, ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as the best tools for simulation training.
“In fact, you need a combination of all three to have the best possible negotiation tool. One AI tool cannot do it all. One is good at one thing, another is good at something else and the third is good at something entirely different,” explains the negotiation expert.
For that reason, you’ll be in the strongest position if you’ve practiced for your pay negotiations using all three AI tools. For them to work optimally, you should train your chatbot before you begin the simulation exercise.
3. Train your AI tool
Usually, when you ask the ChatGPT chatbot a question that it needs to answer, it is called "prompting". But before you start a simulation exercise, you need to meta-prompt the chatbot. In other words, you should ask the AI chatbot to ask you questions as if it were a manager during a salary review. You ask it to take on the role of chief negotiator in a simulated review.
"This provides a completely different quality. The AI chatbot figures out exactly what you want. And the dialogue is different,” Keld Jensen points out.
Similarly, it is important that you also train the AI by asking it to respond to you with “brutal honesty” in the simulation scenario. By default, the AI chatbot is programmed to respond to you in a friendly and polite manner – it wants to make you happy – but that won’t be helpful in a situation where it has to play the role of your counterpart in a simulated salary review. In addition, you should ask the chatbot not to start responding until you are ready to begin the simulation. The better the instructions you provide to the chatbot in advance, the better and more authentic the simulation itself will be when you start.
5. Use AI for brainstorming: what else is up for negotiation?
Pay negotiations easily become a matter of money. Are you going to give me 5,000 kroner, or aren't you? That's what you call a zero-sum game. If one person gets 5,000 kroner, the other will lose it. But according to Keld Jensen, many different things, or variables as he prefers to call them, are subject to negotiation.
“For example, it might not cost the manager much to give me three extra days off, but it would mean the world to me.” The more we bring other variables than price into play, the easier the negotiations may actually become,” explains Keld Jensen.
He recommends using AI in that situation as well to brainstorm and broaden your horizon as to what is up for negotiation. You might be able to negotiate for holidays, extra time off, travel, training, equipment or home internet access.
“AI can also help in that connection if you ask the question: 'Are there other factors in this job or in this industry that might be relevant to me, given my background?'.”
In Keld Jensen's view, AI is a work tool in the same way as a spreadsheet. It’s an intelligent checklist that helps you stay on top of things during negotiations.