With AI in the Bargaining Ring

Rethinking Negotiation Training

In their design thinking workshops, the researchers initially observed that while role-playing is a common tool for sales training, it is not only bound to time and place, but also takes up to 40% of the training budget. The researchers decided to remedy this by translating it into the virtual world: Together with their partners Tricat and ZwickRoell, who contributed practical technology and sales expertise, the team led by Professor Alexander Kracklauer, Barbara Dannenmann and Jan Fiedler developed a prototype that makes it possible to negotiate with a bot. The unique aspect of this virtual simulation is the way it combines speech recognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning in a VR environment.

Testing Negotiation Styles

The bot behind the avatars John and Paul served as a prototype. Research assistant Barbara Dannenmann fed it around 700 sentences and assigned them to different negotiation styles. However, this artificial intelligence uniquely uses no predefined script; the bot already recognizes the corresponding negotiation styles from partial sentences—and learns by itself every time.

More Flexibility through AI

"It was particularly important to us to design the setting as naturally as possible: You shouldn’t just have to navigate artificially generated dialogs, but be able to interact via natural language," explains Jan Fiedler, research assistant for the field of virtual/augmented reality. In this way, typical scenes in the business-to-business segment can be simulated and trained without being subjected to the time pressure and artificial framework of a seminar situation.

Higher Learning Success in the VR Setting

In an initial study, the researchers found that learning success in the VR setting is actually even higher than through classic role-playing games. Currently, negotiation training with the prototype is based on a single, exemplary negotiation situation or tactic—in this case, the peacemeal strategy—which can be played out. In order to expand the use cases, the application is to be extended in the medium term with the additional component of an editor. This will enable trainers to customize the application to their specific needs in the future. In this way, virtual negotiation training opens up a wide range of different use cases—from salary negotiations to consulting meetings.

In a current study, the Beat the Bot team is gathering further data on how this technology-enhanced negotiation training compares to in-person role-play training for users. “Our first study focused primarily on subjective perception. Now we would like to compare VR and classic role-playing, primarily on the basis of body function measurements. Our main goalis to show what added value virtual negotiation training has over classic training,” says Jan Fiedler, explaining the Sales Lab team’s medium-term plans.