These days, online dispute resolution platforms resolve millions of consumer disputes. Increasingly these programs are being used in the courts and offer some form of third-party mediation. Ethan Katsh uses the term “digital justice” to describe consumer disputes and negotiations that employ technology to resolve problems, such as being harassed on Twitter or challenging negative reviews on Airbnb.

Worldwide, countries are beginning to use artificial intelligence or digital justice in their judicial processes. In Estonia, artificial intelligence adjudicates small claim disputes under a certain dollar amount, and in Canada artificial intelligence is used in some areas of the law, such as strata (as condominiums are known in British Columbia) property disputes and motor vehicle claims below a certain amount.

But no country has done more to digitize its justice system than China. Its far reaching Smart Courts Initiative includes internet courts; tracking of sentencing and judgment outcomes; hearing recording storage; facial recognition to verify litigant’s identity; blockchain-based systems to authenticate evidence; and more. Much of the development of China’s systems has been built by major tech firms like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent.

According to the Zheng province government website, parties register with their mobile phone, describe the dispute and upload materials. Mediators conduct an online video session, and if the parties reach resolution, they apply for judicial confirmation of their online agreement.

Rather than fully automated decision platforms for negotiation, the design most likely favored in Western cultures will be platforms that evaluate options for outcomes and suggest options leaving it to the human participants to resolve the disputes themselves.

As a doctoral student at Cornell University, Ernest Thiessen used game theory to develop an efficient methodology for complex negotiations known as Interactive Computer-Assisted Negotiation Support System or ICANS, the first secure multiparty negotiation tool of its kind, known by many now as SmartSettle ONE® and SmartSettle Infinity®.

With SmartSettle ONE®, negotiators communicate via a secure neutral server on the Internet that acts as a mediator using AI algorithms to suggest efficient outcomes. The negotiators may interact entirely online or some combination of face-to-face, if they so choose.

Smartsettle Infinity® is able to handle multiple-party and any number of quantitative or qualitative issues with collaborative decision making. It’s perhaps the most advanced negotiation system available. The process involves parties first submitting initial proposals and the program elicits the their preferences. The parties are encouraged to accurately present their positions as misrepresentation will lead to inferior outcomes.

SmartSettle provides negotiators with a graphic interface panel that displays their proposals as well as those it generates. When negotiating multiple issues, the proposals are presented as packages comprised of values for all the issues. Parties may adjust their positions or accept a proposal in confidence, which is referred to in SmartSettle as a bid. When the system detects an overlap of bidding an agreement is declared.

Negotiators may request an improvement to their agreement. SmartSettle then generates potential agreements based on the game theory algorithm “maximize the minimum gain.”

If negotiators desire to work collaboratively, and if they are willing to be forthright in expressing their preferences, the system will facilitate their negotiation. SmartSettle is being used successfully for separation agreements, environmental disputes, insurance claims and to model possible agreements for Brexit as well as for Ukraine and Russia.

One study has concluded that in some situations AI negotiating agents can outperform human beings in terms of deal optimization, but less able to deal with arbitrary human conversations, semantic issues, emotions, and participants not being forthright or negotiating collaboratively.