MILANO – Will we negotiate a salary increase with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Or will a chatbot be our ally to face the boss in asking to give us what we think is right?
The AI phenomenon is increasingly rampant, from the financial markets to the repercussions on life and work. So much so that it is also evaluated for one of the most “critical” moments and harbingers of stress: the negotiation of the paycheck. Slowly, we are still in the first steps. Yet some more frontier experiences, which come from the Anglo-Saxon world, say that after having entered into the evaluation of candidates for a job, even on the more “intimate” front of negotiations with companies, the algorithm could rage.
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The most interesting case, cited in an overview of Axiosis that of The agreement of Ai. It is a company that has developed software to automate negotiations in supply contracts. His big client is the Walmart, the giant of supermarkets. A case also ended up on the Harvard blog, where it was noted that – in the light of the 100,000 suppliers with which Walmart has to regulate relations – inevitably, a significant part (20%) of these agreements ends up being a simple list of clauses , without “added value”. The problem is that the cost of putting human teams to polish those details would eat away at all the profit extracted. So then you can put the machine to work. First with a pilot project in Canada, then in the US, the chatbots were trained to conduct negotiations, complete with information on the margins to be granted to the counterparties. And they closed contracts, with seven out of ten suppliers and in an average of 11 days, reaching savings of around 3%.
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Now, this type of proceeding could land in the wage bargaining. Pactum itself makes use of it internally, while Ironclad – a startup backed by venture capital giants such as Sequoia and Accel – is specializing in the use of AI for contract analysis.
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Pros and cons of generative AI
The positive side of the negotiation conducted by the chatbot is that – if trained in good faith – it can eliminate those preconceptions that are rampant in wage negotiation, starting with the distinction between men and women. AI could best interpret the new needs that emerged during the pandemic. There are no cons. New inequalities could emerge: workers who approach the chatbot giving inadequate indications, or in a situation of lack of context information, they will find themselves at a disadvantage. Then there is to understand how the best profiles would react when faced with the difficulty of showcasing their “soft-skills”, transversal abilities such as “knowing how to play as a team”, which often emerge from not verbal communication. Without considering that it is one thing to haggle for the supply of carts or potatoes, another to try to recruit a talent. In addition to the problems of privacy which could open if the chatbot was careless in handling personal data.
Because of this Martin Randthe CEO of Pactum, ad Axios he said he still sees such a large-scale development as difficult, preferring to keep the company’s helm on automating supply negotiations.
Training with the robot to ask for a raise
Seen from the workers’ side, generative intelligence could be interesting in other respects. A kind of gym to practice wage bargaining. A counterparty with whom to dialogue to ask for a raise, waiting to then grapple with the employer in the real world. And try to get to the match a little more aware, perhaps with some advice provided by the algorithm.
How much of this could affect us closely? First of all, we must remember the strong differences between the Anglo-Saxon and Italian labor markets, where there are greater rigidities, the “personal” negotiation of the salary package is limited to the highest positions and more specialized profiles, the presence of national contracts creates a framework quite stiff. “The use of artificial intelligence systems certainly has some advantages, such as greater objectivity and effectiveness in data analysis, and probably also the possibility of simulating, on the worker side, some negotiation dynamics arriving with greater preparation and awareness at the moment of truth ”, he reasons Federico Ferri, Job Pricing partner. Then there is another aspect to consider: “A critical success factor in salary negotiation is the ability to find a good balance between compliance with company guidelines, which serves to guarantee fair treatment, and the understanding of emotional states of people: AI could strip the negotiation process of its human character. By reducing personal interaction and empathy, it would also be difficult to make the employee understand the company’s choices, for example to support the reasons for a possible ‘no’ to some requests”. Refusing a raise and not losing the worker is a human art, diabolical at best, but not artificial.