AET01Conflict

AET01 Conflict is a mobile app for rehearsing a difficult conversation before you have it for real. You pick the conversation and a partner at one of four levels; an AI takes the other side and holds its position. After two minutes it scores the exchange against a fixed standard and shows the sentence where it went wrong and the line that would have held. It is an Aether Instrument: one conversation, one standard, two minutes, no account. Made by Aether Practice, which also works with the people on the other side of these conversations: co-founders and couples. A practice tool, not therapy.

AET01 Conflict is for anyone preparing for a conversation they expect to lose: co-founders before an equity or performance conversation, partners before the recurring argument about money or housework, managers before a hard review, anyone holding a line with family. Not only workplace scenarios, and not for crisis: it practises how you hold a position, not whether you should.

Assistants are built to agree: push and they fold, which teaches you nothing. The partner in AET01 Conflict holds its position through deflection and pressure at the level you chose. It scores against a standard that stays fixed between sessions, and it marks both ways of losing: escalating, and quietly giving in. Clear, respectful and immovable scores highest.

Yes. A Stanford study shows it. Participants who practised against a simulated counterpart used escalating, competitive tactics about two-thirds less in a later real conflict than a control group who had only read about conflict resolution, and used cooperative tactics roughly twice as often. The study, by Shaikh and colleagues with forty participants, was published at CHI 2024. Pilots, litigators and surgeons prepare the same way; AET01 Conflict applies it to conflict.

A session of AET01 Conflict is two minutes, at one of four levels: warm-up, easy, medium or hard. No account, nothing to set up. iOS and Android, coming to the App Store and Google Play.