Enhancing international negotiations with AI
How can AI support more inclusive, informed and effective international negotiations?
In our fourth AI for Social Good webinar, Enhance international negotiation with AI, we heard from experts in diplomacy, law, negotiation and advocacy. They discussed how AI tools can enhance negotiation and advocacy preparation, bridge capacity gaps, and support decision-making, while considering AI risks around bias, misuse and over-reliance.
Check out our key takeaways, for anyone working at the intersection of AI, advocacy and international dialogue and negotiation, moderated by PoliSync’s Tech4Good Strategist, Sandra Uwantege Hart.
“AI can help us do background research to understand the opportunities that we have as actors trying to engage or advocate in policy processes, even if we have incredibly small teams, tight deadlines, and no funds.” - Dr Cecilia Cannon, PoliSync.
Cecilia emphasised how AI can support under-resourced advocates in negotiation processes, particularly for background research, stakeholder mappings, understanding actor positions, and messaging. By using AI to analyse documents, sharpen policy objectives, and prepare advocacy materials, non-governmental actors can engage more effectively in complex international policy forums.
“We believe that practitioners can become more confident in the use of AI capabilities and be able to develop their skills as a community of practice to bridge social divides… We teach people how to craft customised models. What a model will give you is only the start… You never take the output of a model at any stage as being the final authoritative statement.” - Claude Bruderlein, Frontline Associates.
Claude highlighted the importance of treating AI as a collaborative assistant, not a shortcut. Through live simulations and training, he showed how negotiators can craft and prompt custom AI models to prepare, simulate, and refine negotiation tactics, while always retaining human judgment and strategic control.
“Just because it talks well doesn’t mean it negotiates well.” - Tea Mustać, Spirit Legal & Institute for Global Negotiation.
Tea warned against over-reliance on generative AI tools, especially in politically sensitive contexts. She advocated for using AI to support (not lead) tasks like treaty language refinement, scenario planning, and position analysis. Human expertise remains essential, particularly when it comes to ethics, legal risks, and high-stakes decisions.
“I asked co-pilot and Chatgpt to analyze the statements that had been submitted for the stock taking meeting of the Global Compact for Migration negotiation process… to look at how each stakeholder defines the issue of migration, the stakeholder’s main positions in the negotiations and their proposed policy solutions… It provided a very nice, brief table that summarized this information.” - Cecilia Cannon.
Cecilia explained that these tools offer a helpful support for researching policy processes and stakeholder positions in negotiations, facilitating clearer policy objectives and advocacy messaging. Though the information generated always requires verification and can at times be incorrect, these tools help to save time and provides a solid tool to support advocacy efforts.
“You can rely on AI as a teacher, a counterpart, a team member, or a mediator… You can use AI to teach you strategies, to show you better ways forward to brainstorm with you how to deal with something as a team member. It can help you prepare. It can do your briefings. It can give you alternative arguments, etc.” - Tea Mustać
Tea explained that you can use AI to bulletproof your own arguments, by arguing with AI to stongman yourself into making even better arguments. She stressed that we need to remember that AI is not going to generate perfect outputs, just like humans. There is always a risk of biased outputs, in both AI and human generated outputs.
Didn’t make it or want to watch it again? Access it on our free AI resources webpage.
https://www.polisync.org/ai-for-social-good-resources
Or watch it on our YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltggCaohwAY&t=2997s
Want to learn new GenAI tools? Sign up for our new, free Certificate in Applied AI for Social Good - an online, four-module, learn-at-your-own-pace course designed to help nonprofits integrate AI tools into their work effectively and responsibly www.polisync.org/ai-certificate .
https://www.polisync.org/ai-for-social-good-resources
Caux Initiatives of Change Foundation
Institute for Global Negotiation
IOM Research
The Lotus Flower
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