Episode 98 · 2021-09-08 · 57:02 · Original in Finnish
AI and GPT-3 in Negotiation | Tuomas Rasila | Negotiator 98
Originally published as “Tekoäly GPT-3 neuvottelu | Tuomas Rasila | Neuvottelija 98”
Tuomas Rasila, founder of Stealth Black, builds assistive intelligence on top of GPT-3 that prepares sales and negotiation openings but never sends anything itself. The episode's load-bearing claim is not efficiency but honesty: humans in a negotiation are prone to overselling, and a machine is not, because its opening is built from demonstrable facts. Rasila's most original concept is sales pollution — a badly prepared approach is not merely wasted time but a shared loss, since the caller feels rejected and the recipient feels harassed, and because only the deal won gets recorded and never the number of people bothered, the cost stays invisible. He likens it to emissions: polluting ought to cost something. The concrete cases are commercial property brokerage and corporate car sales, and the discussion connects to Timo Honkela's meaning negotiation and to Martti Ahtisaari's principled negotiation.
Core theses
- The machine's advantage is that it cannot oversell, because its opening is assembled from facts that can be shown — an honesty argument, not an efficiency one.
- Sales pollution names a real externality: the cost of a bad approach falls on the recipient and is never recorded anywhere.
- The system never sends. Keeping a human at the send decision is the boundary that makes the rest defensible.
- A value is a useless word until it is tied to behaviour specific enough to call an algorithm — at which point it becomes a principle.
Watch and listen
Key moments
- 00:00 — A machine does not oversell: facts stay facts
- 00:59 — The guest is Tuomas Rasila, founder of Stealth Black
- 01:55 — GPT-3, and Risto Linturi's avatar experiment
- 02:57 — GPT-3 anticipated the course of Covid without fresh data
- 05:46 — Analytical minds: the engineer, the artist and the genius
- 07:11 — Marketing, sales and negotiation as a single pipeline
- 10:15 — Anchoring the price with data in a commercial property negotiation
- 12:29 — The ideal negotiation first, the counterparty second
- 14:18 — 'Do you happen to need premises': the laboriousness is the problem
- 17:09 — Channels: LinkedIn, email and WhatsApp
- 19:43 — The same engine produces the short message and the presentation
- 20:31 — Mass personalisation against every sentence adding value
- 24:00 — The machine sends nothing; a human decides
- 25:41 — The mobile app, push notifications and the CRM connection
- 27:15 — From the Commodore 64 to signals intelligence: Rasila's background
- 32:18 — War, power and the joint win in a negotiation
- 33:34 — Sales pollution: a bad opening is a shared loss
- 35:57 — Timo Honkela's meaning negotiation, and interest maps
- 38:09 — Ahtisaari and principled negotiation
- 40:34 — Negotiation as chess: language turned into moves
- 42:07 — Reputation, trust and the cost of spamming
- 44:20 — The contact map: several people in the same negotiation
- 46:35 — A first encounter changes how the message is read
- 48:06 — Automation against steering people into meetings
- 50:24 — Car sales: driving history predicts the next car
- 53:14 — SaaS selling: ice to Eskimos does not work
- 56:05 — Closing words
Summary
Tuomas Rasila, founder of Stealth Black, builds assistive intelligence on top of GPT-3 that prepares sales and negotiation openings but never sends anything itself. The episode’s load-bearing claim is not efficiency but honesty: humans in a negotiation are prone to overselling, and a machine is not, because its opening is built from demonstrable facts. Rasila’s most original concept is sales pollution — a badly prepared approach is not merely wasted time but a shared loss, since the caller feels rejected and the recipient feels harassed, and because only the deal won gets recorded and never the number of people bothered, the cost stays invisible. He likens it to emissions: polluting ought to cost something. The concrete cases are commercial property brokerage and corporate car sales, and the discussion connects to Timo Honkela’s meaning negotiation and to Martti Ahtisaari’s principled negotiation.
Honesty, not speed
The usual case for automating an opening is that it saves time. Rasila’s is different and better: a person under quota overstates, and a system assembling an opening from facts it can point at does not. That makes the argument about the quality of the claim rather than the cost of making it.
Sales pollution
The best idea in the episode. A poorly targeted approach costs the sender a little time and the recipient a little goodwill, and only the sender’s side is ever measured. Deals won get recorded; people annoyed do not. Naming that as an externality — and suggesting it should carry a price — is a genuinely new framing of cold outreach.
The send button stays human
The system prepares and never dispatches. That single boundary is what keeps the honesty argument intact, because a person remains answerable for every message that actually leaves.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Tekoäly GPT-3 neuvottelu | Tuomas Rasila | Neuvottelija 98. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
In depth
The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.
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Guests: Tuomas Rasila
Topics: AI & Enterprise Tech Negotiation