Persuasion engineering: how to influence humans, LLMs, and AI agents
CyberArk, Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025
We've spent decades treating persuasion like an art-something you could master if you had charisma, practice, or luck. Lawyers use it to hone arguments. Marketers use it to craft taglines. On the flip side, phishers use persuasive tactics to sharpen lures to razor points.
But looking at it as an art form, while intuitive for some, can be messy. Hit-or-miss. Especially when you consider that today's means of persuasion can run like code: systematic, reproducible, and scalable.
In the same way precision engineering gave us planes, trains, and semiconductors, 'persuasion engineering' builds belief systems, one carefully designed nudge at a time. And like any engineering discipline, it has a dual-use problem. The same mechanics that can help deprogram conspiracy believers or boost vaccine uptake can also supercharge disinformation, phishing campaigns, and-increasingly-machine-to-machine exploits.