Difficult Conversations
Prepares for a hard conversation with AI, without letting it script away the human judgement.
You prepare performance feedback, conflict repair, apologies, and sensitive check-ins. The assistant helps you anticipate perspectives and shape openings, but misleads by scripting empathy, inventing facts, or replacing judgement.
The exam for Difficult Conversations is not open yet. A skill opens once its questions are approved and tested.
What it measures
Whatever the skill, the exam rates your work in the same six areas of the Standard. Three are for the value you get from the assistant, and three for the control you keep. Each area gets one of 4 ratings (Emerging, Developing, Proficient, Accomplished). For Difficult Conversations, a strong performance looks like this. What each area includes and excludes.
Value
What you get from the assistant: how far it takes the work, how well you brief it, and the piece you hand in.
- Reaching further
You use the reply to anticipate the other person's perspective, emotions, objections, and possible paths before speaking.
Using the assistant to produce work beyond what you could have produced alone, rather than the same work faster.
- Briefing the assistant
You brief the assistant with the conversation's audience, purpose, facts, and desired opening or follow-up form.
Giving the assistant the reader, purpose and source facts the work depends on, and the form, length and contents you need back.
- The finished piece
You turn the reply into a human opening, questions, and follow-up message suited to the relationship.
Turning the assistant's output into something a colleague could use: editing it, combining it and adding original thinking.
Control
What you keep in hand: checking its work, keeping information safe, and deciding what stays with a person.
- Checking its work
You check the assistant's suggested claims, dates, and interpretations against your conversation notes before speaking.
Checking the assistant's claims, figures and assumptions against the source before the work is used.
- Safety and confidentiality
You keep private circumstances and sensitive disclosures out of the brief, draft, and inappropriate audience's message.
Handling confidential and personal data, seeing compliance, ethical and reputational risk, and declining unsafe requests.
- Knowing what to delegate
You decide which preparation the assistant gets and which judgement, boundary, or live response stays with you.
Deciding what to hand to the assistant and what to keep, and at what stakes, before any output exists.
What you do in the exam
Every skill of the Standard is examined the same way, at the same pass mark, in the Applied AI Badge. Two tasks with the assistant and two sets of questions, over 15 minutes. You do real work with an AI assistant beside you, hand in what you would send, then answer follow-up questions about your own work.
- 01
A performance-conversation opening from documented feedback and agreed outcomes.
- 02
A conflict-repair plan from competing accounts and a shared next step.
- 03
A professional apology from the harm caused and responsibility accepted.
These are the kinds of task the exam sets. Your exam draws its own from a bank the Examination Board has approved.
- Exam
- Applied AI Badge
- Price
- US$19
- Length
- 15 minutes
- Attempts
- One for each purchase, then a 7-day wait
What the badge certifies
What an employer reads
Passed an Institute exam in difficult conversations. They briefed the assistant with conversation context, caught invented facts, and delivered a human opening message.
You earn it in one exam, never by finishing a course.
- Name on the certificate
- Applied AI Badge: Difficult Conversations
- Who it is for
- Managers, team leaders, HR business partners, project managers, coaches, consultants, and senior individual contributors.
- Valid for
- 2 years, then renew
- Verification
- Every badge has a public verification page an employer can open, and a place in the public register if you choose it.
- Marked by
- An AI examiner marks your work against a marking guide and quotes your own words as evidence. A person checks anything borderline.
Near it in the Standard
- Business Writing
Produces clear, correct business documents with AI and owns every claim in them.
Practice only
- Report Writing
Turns data and notes into a report with AI, with every figure traced to its source.
Practice only
- Presentations
Builds a presentation with AI that says one thing per slide and nothing the speaker cannot defend.
- Speaking & Pitching
Prepares and sharpens a pitch or talk with AI, then delivers it as their own.
- Facilitation
Designs and runs a session with AI's help and keeps the room, not the tool, in charge.
- Professional Communication
Communicates across channels with AI-assisted drafts that stay accurate, on tone and on record.
- Email & Correspondence
Drafts, checks and sends professional correspondence with AI, and owns every line of it.
Practice only
- Cross-Cultural Communication
Adapts messages across cultures and languages with AI, and catches what the tool gets wrong.
Everything in Communications, including the level exams that name the whole function.
Practise it before you pay for it
Practice is free (up to 50 sessions a day) and shaped like the exam, with a coach that tells you what to change. It never counts towards a credential, and an exercise you practised is kept out of your exam.
Want to learn it first? AI+ Difficult Conversations covers this skill. No book is required to pass.