Negotiate Anything What AI Reveals About Winning Negotiation Tactics
May 10, 2026
Jordi Quedback, a negotiation researcher and professor using AI and big data to decode real conversations, and Richard Shotton, a behavioral scientist and author who applies psychology to persuasion, unpack surprising tactics. They explore how admitting the right weaknesses boosts credibility, why precise numbers and concrete language persuade, and how different question types and speaking style shape outcomes.
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Make Benefits Concrete And Visual
- Concrete, visualizable language is far more memorable than abstract claims.
- Ian Begg's study: people recalled 36% of concrete words versus 9% of abstract ones; Apple used 'thousand songs in your pocket' to make memory tangible.
We Vastly Overestimate How Much We Ask
- Negotiators ask far fewer open-ended questions than they think, with open questions comprising ~8% of speech turns.
- Jordi Quedback measured 600 negotiations using AI to detect questions across thousands of hours.
Ask More Open Questions To Improve Outcomes
- Ask more open-ended questions: higher question rates strongly correlate with better objective outcomes.
- In Jordi's dataset, negotiators who ask more open questions consistently secure better deals with no clear diminishing returns.
