Can AI help with salary negotiation?

The useful work happens days before anyone dials in. A general chatbot handles the research and drafting well: summarizing pay bands you paste in, turning your scope and results into two sentences you can say out loud, and stress-testing your counter by playing a recruiter who says no.

Rehearsal is the part people skip. Saying your number to a screen a few times is not the same as thinking about it, and out loud is where the wobble gets ironed out. A mock interview session works for this even though the topic is not a technical question; the format is what matters, a voice asks and you answer under mild pressure.

The worry about running a tool during a salary call is fair: either it does nothing useful, or it is obvious to the person on the other end. Here is what actually happens on screen. Two things show up, a running transcript of what the recruiter is saying, and suggested phrasing you can glance at while you think.

SubcueAI ships two live surfaces and both are real. The native macOS and Windows app captures system audio alongside your microphone and shows a floating local overlay above whatever meeting client you are in, so it covers Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams desktop calls. The browser extension Side Panel also does live assist on Chromium browsers, capturing the meeting tab's audio only, which means it hears the recruiter and never transcribes you. Neither surface joins the call as a participant, and neither injects anything into the meeting page.

An assistant does not know what your work is worth. It has no view of the company's internal band, no idea what your future peers are paid, and no read on whether this particular recruiter has room to move. The number is yours to set, and every suggestion the tool makes is downstream of the figure you already decided on.

Aaron Cao, founder of SubcueAI, built the live surface around a deliberately narrow claim: transcribe the other side accurately, and put a suggestion where your eyes already are. That is much less than negotiating for you, on purpose. A tool that invented a salary figure and told you to say it would be confidently wrong at the worst possible moment.

The usual limits apply too, and they matter more on a call about money. If you share your screen, the overlay is on that screen. If the call is recorded, that recording is a normal artifact you do not control. On a company-managed laptop, assume the device policy sees more than you do.

Setup is the same as for an interview, because to the software this is just another call. Install the desktop app or the extension, pick the audio source, and confirm the transcript is moving before the recruiter joins. Running that check five minutes early is the difference between a tool that helps and one you are still fixing while someone is talking.

Then give it context. Live suggestions get sharper when the assistant knows the role and the offer you are responding to, the same way it reads your active resume and job description during an interview. Step by step setup is on the tutorial page, and what happens to the audio and the transcript afterward is written out on the security page.