Increasingly, employees and job seekers are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT for help navigating their careers. AI can identify jobs in your field, advise on how to prepare for a new career, improve your résumé, and coach you on how to answer tough interview questions. In addition, AI can offer advice on how to negotiate a pay raise or starting salary.
While AI offers ample information cheaply and quickly, it can introduce errors and implicit biases into the hiring process, whether used by hiring organizations, employees, or job candidates. Here, we’ll consider how to best use AI to negotiate pay.
Ask the Right Questions
In June 2023, Employee Benefit News (EBN) concluded that “ChatGPT is not ready to take on employee salary benchmarking.” When asked “What salary should I offer a software engineer in the U.S. with five years’ experience?” the chatbot responded with a salary range of $100,000 to $120,000 per year, perhaps up to $150,000 in cities with a high cost of living, such as San Francisco, New York, and Seattle. (ChatGPT gave the same response in February 2025.) By contrast, EBN cited anonymized data from Dayforce (formerly Ceridian) clients showing that a more typical salary would be around $87,000 for someone with five years of experience.
To answer the software engineer question, ChatGPT may have collected data on self-reported salaries, which tends to be inflated. EBN reported that ChatGPT provided a more accurate response when asked to respond as if it were a member of the HR team. This seemed to cue the chatbot to gather data from less biased, HR-focused sources.
ChatGPT also provided more accurate salary ranges when asked to suggest an offer for a cashier in the United States with five years of experience.
These responses highlight the importance of asking AI chatbots the right questions when determining how to negotiate a pay raise or starting salary. In general, the more specific your request, the more accurate the response will be.
Fine-Tune Your Argument
In an article for Tom’s Guide, Kaycee Hill offers advice on how to negotiate a pay raise using AI. Specifically, try the following prompts:
- Include a list of your recent accomplishments and ask the chatbot, “Help me describe these work achievements in a way that demonstrates their value” to the organization.
- Include organizational performance data and ask, “How can I connect my personal achievements to these company performance metrics?”
- Construct a compelling argument for a raise: “Based on my achievements and the salary data, help me create three strong reasons why I deserve a raise.”
As Hill notes, it’s also important to anticipate possible objections to your request when considering how to negotiate a pay raise, perhaps by asking, “What are common objections to raise requests, and how can I prepare to respond to them?”
You can also ask a chatbot for a sample salary-negotiation script to help you anticipate how the conversation might go if and when you’re offered a raise or starting salary.
AI across the Table
After using AI to prepare for salary negotiations, you may find yourself negotiating your salary with an AI counterpart. Pactum, a provider of automated procurement negotiation, created an AI chatbot to negotiate compensation packages with its employees.
The chatbot has created value in these negotiations by presenting employees with multiple equivalent simultaneous offers (also known as MESOs), Pactum president and co-founder Martin Rand told Axios. When a hiring organization presents several offers that it values similarly, it can boost the odds of coming to a win-win agreement.
Another benefit: While men tended to negotiate harder on compensation than women in person, men and women negotiated equally hard with the bot, according to Rand.
One Tool among Many
IBM reported in a 2022 study that 74% of organizations had not taken steps to address bias in their AI. While that number is likely to decline over time, it highlights that it would be a mistake for individuals to rely on AI as an exclusive source of salary data or for organizations to fully depend on it as a contract negotiator.
When considering how to negotiate a pay raise or starting salary, employees and job seekers should continue to gather salary data from an array of online and offline sources, including websites, news stories, and industry insiders. A friend who hires people for the type of role you’re seeking to fill would be a rich source of advice, for example. Keep in mind, though, that friends and associates might not be completely honest when citing average salaries for work they themselves perform.
In addition, individuals and organizations alike need to remember that hiring and promotion negotiations will create more value for both sides when they broaden beyond salary negotiations to include a wide array of issues in the discussion, including benefits, location, start date, and so on.
What questions or concerns do you have regarding how to negotiate a pay raise or starting salary using AI?
