Mediator here. This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what mediation is for. Mediation is about helping the disputants find a solution they can live with, but mediators never decide what that is. Mediations have a large emotional, human component. Most mediations include a step of just giving parties a chance to be heard by another human being. Mediation outcomes don't look like court outcomes for a reason.

And mediators do sometimes offer a mediator's proposal, but that's the exception, not the rule, and mediators do not decide what is fair. That's not mediation.

Real examples:

1. $50,000 contract dispute, really just wanted an apology, and dropped the dispute once they got it.

2. Civil dispute over incomplete landscaping that had been paid for. Was actually about an explanation for a romantic break-up. Ended with paying to replace the flowers.

3. So many disputes over which extended family members can have what access to kids, pets, and boats.

Those are choices the disputants made for what was an acceptable outcome, not the mediator, which is the point of mediation.

This tool sounds like it might be closer to something for Arbitration? That's a very different environment.

Appreciate the pushback, but I think this misreads the mechanism. Mediator.ai doesn't decide; it generates candidate agreements, scores them against both sides' stated preferences, and presents the best one. Either party can reject the proposed agreement. The parties still have to agree. That's facilitation, not arbitration.

On the hidden-interests point: the assistant actually tries to tease out unstated preferences. That's what the conversation with each party is for, and it uses several preference-elicitation strategies to get at what's underneath a stated position - but I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity for refinement here.

/Agree

As a long time techie I understand the desire to approach mediation as a programmatic systems problem, but as a mediator, I'd recommend OP work as a volunteer mediator long enough to realize that mediation is ~90% soft skills.

Do you use principles of nonviolent communication in your work? Or another framework to establish nondefensive listening?