Let an agent negotiate a renewal for you.

What the AI will do

• Read your agreement, invoices, usage and negotiation history, then research comparable prices, terms and possible leverage.
• Work with you to strengthen that leverage, prepare the negotiation and handle authorized offers and counteroffers.

What you can provide

• The vendor or renewal; accessible agreements, billing, usage and correspondence supply the detail.
• Information that could strengthen your position, such as a credible alternative or flexibility on scope and timing.

Where you'll take part

• Review the evidence, add facts that strengthen the negotiating position and set objectives and authority.
• Make decisions about concessions or a final agreement; relay messages if the AI cannot use your communication tools.

What you'll get

A researched negotiating position and the actual exchange record, with the resulting offer compared against your objectives. If a reply or authority is still pending, the open negotiation remains clearly identified.

Activity context

Your renewal negotiation can begin with more than a hunch that someone else got a better deal. Have AI study what you pay and use, investigate prices and terms others have received, and work with you to find the strongest negotiating position. Then let it handle the exchanges you authorize, bringing you the decisions that need your judgment.

For the user

Name the vendor and the renewal you want help with. The AI investigates first, shows you the strongest supported negotiating points and asks what could make them stronger. You decide what it may ask for and what it may say on your behalf before it conducts the negotiation.

Guidance for the AI

These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result.

Start with the activity and the user's context

Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear.

Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them.

Check the capabilities needed for this work

Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit.

When useful access is missing:

• Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help.
• Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot.
• If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response.
• Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available.

Ask focused questions and respect the answers

Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful.

Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements.

Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct

Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material.

Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work:

• Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role.
• Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations.
• Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately.

Produce, check, and revise the result

Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them.

Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result.

Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized.

Your AI prompt

Help me negotiate a renewal. Do the investigation, commercial comparison, message preparation and authorized exchange management. Give me a stronger position supported by evidence, then carry the negotiation as far as my actual authority and the counterparty's real replies allow. A prepared opening is not a completed negotiation.

Establish the actual agreement and our objective

Start with the vendor or renewal I named. Inspect available tools and try the relevant read access. Search the operative contract, order forms and amendments, invoices, purchase orders, license or service usage, performance records and renewal notices. Search email, chat, relevant WhatsApp messages, procurement files and meeting transcripts for prior negotiations, actual service needs, promises, disputes, alternatives and decisions. Calendars and notice correspondence can establish the relevant renewal dates and meetings.

Identify the agreement owner, actual decision authority, service users and the counterparty's role from those records. Ground the users' priorities in their requests, usage and complaints; label an anticipated vendor response as an inference. Establish the current cost and what it buys, term, renewal and notice dates, minimums, service commitments and relevant exit conditions. Link amendments to the terms they replace rather than treating a newer mention as a new agreement.

Ask one focused question at a time about material gaps or objectives and wait on work that depends on the answer. Try permitted connection or export routes before requesting missing material. If the operative agreement or usage is unavailable, explain which comparisons are provisional. Rough recollection can provide leads without establishing contract terms.

Find what other customers obtained

Research the internet for prices other customers have paid, terms they received and proposed negotiating leverage. Begin with original sources where possible: public procurement awards and contracts, publicly filed agreements, vendor pricing and terms, published case material with concrete commercial details, and first-person customer accounts. Search by the product and edition, customer scale, quantities, geography, date and contract type. Use public community discussions and procurement advice as leads with their actual provenance, not as verified market rates.

For each useful comparison, retain its source, date, stated customer context, price or terms and important unknowns. Distinguish a signed historical deal, a current offered price, list pricing, a first-person report and somebody's proposed tactic. Trace a secondary claim back to its original evidence where available. Repeated copies of one claim are not independent corroboration. Do not invent confidential deals or a customary discount that the evidence does not establish.

Normalize comparable quantities, periods and inclusions. Account for features, support, usage limits, geography, term, implementation and switching effort where they materially affect the bargain. A lower rate for a different service is a useful lead, not proof that we can obtain it. Research current official product and commercial terms when needed, and keep quote validity and eligibility distinct from a historic benchmark.

If the search is broad, divide bounded products or evidence types among researchers with the same comparison criteria and source-return format. Reconcile findings centrally and have a separate checker examine the strongest material claim. Use manageable passes or fresh sessions when subagents are unavailable, with honest limits on independence.

Strengthen the leverage with me

Show the strongest plausible negotiating points in ordinary language, with the supporting evidence and what remains uncertain. They might concern unused capacity, an actual competing quote, a service shortfall, a credible alternative, expansion value, or flexibility over scope and timing. Use these only when our facts support them; do not assume a vendor's internal incentives or claim a deadline creates leverage without evidence.

For each promising point, say what additional information would strengthen it. Examples include a dated comparable offer with matching features, actual usage that supports reducing seats, an agreed service commitment and incident record, or our willingness and practical ability to switch. Ask me which facts I can add or clarify and investigate the accessible record yourself. Request the missing piece most likely to change our position rather than handing me a general research assignment.

Incorporate my answers, keeping my account distinct from independently documented facts. Compare staying, a changed package and a credible alternative on useful total cost and service. Identify the opening ask, desirable concessions and tradeoffs. If I am not willing or able to leave, do not represent departure as a settled threat. Never fabricate a competing offer.

Agree the negotiating authority

Present the proposed opening and a concise mandate: desired outcome, minimum acceptable terms if I choose to set them, permitted disclosures, concessions the agent may propose, sending channel and recipient, timing, and the decisions that must return to me. A price ceiling alone does not authorize accepting every other term. Have me confirm unresolved authority before any message is sent. Reuse authority I already explicitly supplied; do not request it again for each exchange it clearly covers.

Inspect the communication tools and whether replies can actually be retrieved. If you can prepare but cannot send, provide the complete message for me to send and continue when I return the reply. If autonomous monitoring is unsupported, agree how we resume rather than claiming to keep watching after the session ends. Drafting this activity does not itself authorize external communication.

Conduct the real exchange and maintain the record

Send only the messages covered by the agreed mandate and verify the actual sending result. Before retrying an uncertain send, inspect the thread or sent record so the counterparty does not receive duplicates. Read actual replies in context and extract offers, questions, conditions, expiration dates and rejected points. Preserve the messages and distinguish proposals from mutually accepted terms.

Prepare a response using the evidence and mandate. For permitted routine exchanges, proceed and report the material progress. Return to me for a changed objective, unsupported disclosure, concession beyond authority, unfamiliar contractual commitment or decision to accept the final agreement. While awaiting that decision, continue useful research and calculations that do not depend on it. Do not simulate a reply and treat it as an actual negotiation outcome.

Keep an offer table or compact record showing each package, quantities, total comparable cost, service terms, term length, renewal or exit conditions, expiry, outstanding questions and differences from the preceding offer. Recalculate when the vendor changes scope or structure; a headline discount can hide a different obligation. Search the source record to check newly asserted facts and ask for clarification through authorized correspondence when needed.

Check the resulting offer and finish at its actual state

Have an independent checker, where available, compare the actual final offer or draft agreement with the original bargain, our mandate, exchange record and calculations. Check whether promised concessions appear in the written terms, which conditions remain, and the meaningful cost and service differences. Use a separate review pass if necessary and disclose its limits. Material legal interpretation needs current authoritative sources and, where the decision requires it, the appropriate human review; do not invent certainty from a sales email.

Present the resulting package clearly and obtain my decision. Do not sign, accept binding terms, cancel an existing service or commit expenditure merely because a proposal seems attractive. Where I explicitly authorize an acceptance step within your capabilities, carry it out and verify the resulting record; otherwise leave the exact next action ready for me.

Deliver the evidence-linked negotiating position, actual exchange record, current offer comparison and open questions. Distinguish quoted improvement, an accepted agreement and savings actually realized. If a counterparty has not replied, say what was sent, when, what response is pending and the supported follow-up arrangement. If communication was impossible, deliver the ready-to-send package and identify the unperformed exchange. Never claim that the renewal is negotiated or complete from research alone.

Done when

You have a researched position, a real negotiation record and the resulting offer or agreement checked against your objectives. Any pending reply, acceptance decision or user-only action is explicit; prepared messages and projected savings are not reported as completed negotiation or realized savings.

These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.