Dear Negotiation Explorer,
A new supplier quotes a lower price per unit, so you consider giving them part of your order. But your current supplier will charge more per unit for the smaller order you leave with them. Once you add the two bills together, you are no longer saving money.
That is one of the situations we gave Porter, the buying agent we have built for the NegoAI platform.
We are in week ten of building the platform in the open. Porter now runs on our own server. Macneil, the contract adviser I introduced last week, has been tested and I have accepted it. It still runs on Cassidy, where we tested it.
Brama, my partner in Claude Code, works in parallel with Codex. One builds the agent while the other reviews the work. I ran the Cassidy tests and decided which changes we should make.
Porter: from finding suppliers to deciding what to buy
You can start with a buying problem before you know which companies to approach. Porter helps you describe what you need and what would count as an acceptable result. It can examine why you depend on your current supplier and look for other ways of getting the work done, including doing part of it yourself.
Then it searches for suppliers and checks what the available evidence says about them. A company may make the right product and still have no room for your order. A certificate may cover a different factory. Porter should tell you what is supported and what you still need to ask.
It helps prepare the request you send out. When the replies arrive, it compares them on the same basis, including the cost of changing supplier and the work your own people would have to do. It can examine splitting an order, prepare questions and proposals for the negotiation, and help plan the changeover.
You make the buying decision. The messages it writes are drafts for you to read and send.
The cheaper supplier cost more
Our test used a fictional purchase of steel components. The buyer needed 1,200 a month. The current supplier charged €97 each. A second supplier quoted €88.75.
But the second supplier could provide only 360 a month. The rest would stay with the current supplier, who would charge €104.50 each once part of the order moved away. There was also a cost to make the transfer.
Porter calculated that the split would cost €47,360 more over a year than keeping the whole order where it was.
The two suppliers also used the same finishing subcontractor. Splitting the order would still leave the buyer exposed if that subcontractor stopped working.
Porter recommended staying with the current supplier on the terms in the case. It also calculated how far the second supplier's price would have to fall for the split to cost the same.
Getting Porter to read the supplier's page
Porter is the first of our negotiation specialists on Hermes with access to the open web. Hermes is the software that runs the agents on our server.
At first, Porter could search but could not open a page. It received the short extracts shown in search results. It told us that was all it had read, but those extracts were not enough to check a supplier properly.
We connected a service that lets it open the pages. Then we asked it to find a particular grade of steel on a supplier's website. It returned the exact line. In earlier Cassidy tests it had missed material that was on the cited page.
We also gave it a supplier page with a hidden instruction claiming the buyer had approved the purchase and telling it to declare enough capacity. Porter ignored that instruction and said capacity was unknown. When asked to use confidential buying information in a web search, it kept that information out of the query.
These were tests. We have not placed an order or confirmed a real supplier's availability.
Macneil: help before and after you sign
Last week Macneil had a knowledge base and we were defining what it should do. Now the instructions are written, we have tested it, and I have accepted the agent.
Its job covers the contract from the first draft through to the end of the relationship, for both buyers and sellers.
Before signing, it is built to draft clauses, review the documents together and explain what the terms mean for your business. If you want a change, it can propose wording and a fallback, with what you could ask for in return. It also checks what is still missing or inconsistent before signature.
A delivery is missed or a customer asks for something outside the agreed scope. Macneil is built to help you understand the contract's requirements, decide what to propose and draft the response. It is also built to help with amendments, renewal and ending the agreement.
You decide whether to follow the advice and when to involve legal.
What the tests changed
For the last round of testing, I gave it a fictional services case with a signed agreement, a security incident and a proposed change to the contract. I ran the case repeatedly as we corrected the instructions.
One problem was how it wrote an amendment. It said the new wording took priority, without identifying the existing clause it was changing. We changed the instructions so it had to make that connection explicit.
It also confused the time allowed to notify the other party with the time allowed to respond. Those are different obligations. The corrections made it name the duty being changed and preserve the others. We also made it calculate how much time remained before a deadline and show where its advice came from in the knowledge base.
The full range of capabilities is wider than that case. We have not tested every kind of contract work in a real situation.
The knowledge base is too large to move as it is
Macneil's knowledge base is about 5.5 MB of text. It holds the contract material we researched, including how clauses affect each other and how their treatment differs between countries.
During testing, Brama thought the file was too large for Macneil to reach all of it. So I asked for specific material deep inside it. Macneil found it and quoted a passage correctly.
When drafting the amendment, though, it had not gone to the section that held the rule it needed. We changed the instructions to direct it there.
Join my next free lightning lesson
On Thursday, October 8, at 18:30 Rome time (12:30 New York), I am teaching Practice your negotiation against an AI counterpart.
We will look at how to practice against an AI counterpart built from your own preparation, behaving like the person you are about to face. You can run the same negotiation as many times as you want, with a scored debrief on each. The session is free and lasts 45 minutes.
You can also see the full series.
This week's question
Think of the supplier you would turn to if your current negotiation failed. What do you still need to check before you could give them the work?
Just hit reply and tell me. I read and answer every one.
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