November Roundtable Discussion Highlights: Using AI for Better Negotiations

November 21st, 2025, Executive Roundtables for purchasing leaders

The theme of this C-level Executive Roundtable was on actions manufacturing companies are taking to mitigate tariff-related costs and address supply risks. Highlights of the roundtable discussion are summarized below. 

• Director of Procurement for NPI at a truck accessories manufacturer shared that AI is making it easier for buyer to prepare for supplier negotiations, including role playing potential conversations. 
  • They shared that they are figuring out how to embrace AI as an organization, and finding so far that it’s helpful for emails, presentations, and benchmarking.
  • They are talking to suppliers about hot whey are using AI to become more efficient, and communicating to suppliers that they expect faster product development cycles with AI.

• Director of Procurement for a medical technologies company shared that they have used AI for cost benchmarking prior to negotiations,  Other uses have been around communications and market analysis. 
  • They recommended using an AI Prompt tool for developing well-craft prompts to put into chatbots (said many are available; Google “AI prompt tool”). 

• Director of Global Sourcing for a commercial laundry system manufacturer shared that their company has an internal AI tool that let’s users choose amongst different AI chatbots. They shared several ways buyers are using AI: 
  • Read and comment on documents before legal review to identify potential issues 
  • Supplier search – have found sources they weren’t aware of, but commented that AI will make mistakes 
  • Data analysis – reported that buyers share they are “dumping spend data into AI” 
  • Review and edit complex emails 

• Sourcing Director for a returnable packaging supplier shared that they use AI to prepare for supplier reviews and have successfully used AI to push back on supplier price increases. Other ways the purchasing team has found AI to be useful include: 
  • Identifying market trends 
  • Creating images for presentations 
  • Summarize the contents of email strings 

• Head of Strategic Sourcing for an HVAC equipment manufacturer shared their team is using AI to finding suppliers and identifying specific supplier capabilities. 
  • They are using a risk management tool that uses AI to map their tiered supply chain and monitor media to generate timely alerts if there are any events that could impact supply.
  • They are also investigating spend analysis tools that have AI embedded in them. 

• Jeoff Burris, founder of APD, share a short presentation on training AI chatbots on negotiation frameworks to enable teams to better prepare for negotiations.  He highlighted four habits of AI-enabled negotiators: 
  • Structure your prompts and provide context 
  • Edit AI output and upload the edits to train your AI 
  • Save what works to build your own AI playbook 
  • Upload results of negotiations to your AI for continuous improvement