How I Work

**Join the AI Agent Bootcamp here: https://www.inventium.ai/learnvirtually-agents**
The word "agents" is everywhere right now. It shows up in product updates, LinkedIn posts, and conversations at work, and yet for a lot of people, it still doesn't quite click. What actually is an agent? Is it the same as agentic AI? And does any of this actually matter for the way you work?
If you've been nodding along while quietly unsure, you're in good company. The AI industry has done a genuinely poor job of naming things, and it's created a lot of unnecessary confusion.
In this How I AI episode, Neo and I cut through the jargon and get into what agents actually are, how they differ from agentic AI, and where both individuals and teams can start using them right now.
What you’ll learn:
Why the terminology around AI tools is so confusing, and the key distinction between "agents" and "agentic AI" that actually matters in practice.
What an agent is versus what agentic AI is
How individuals can use agents for tasks they repeat regularly
How teams can use agents to standardise outputs like reports, reduce the burden of repetitive questions, and let people self-service answers using a knowledge agent
What the best starting question is to know if a problem can be solved by an agent
Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai, where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M
Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at [email protected]
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do with four extra hours a day? Probably say you don't have them. But according to Laura Vanderkam, one of the world's leading thinkers on time, they're already there. You're just not seeing them.
Laura has tracked her own time for 11 years. She's run large-scale time-tracking studies with hundreds of participants. And what she keeps finding is the same thing: the stories we tell ourselves about our time are almost always wrong. The tasks we dread feel longer than they are. The free time we insist we don't have keeps showing up in the data.
In this How I Work episode, I sit down with Laura to dig into what 11 years of time diaries actually reveal, why tracking your time for just one week can make you feel dramatically better about your life, and how to reclaim those post-dinner hours that most of us write off as dead time. Laura is a bestselling author of many books on time and productivity, and her latest, Big Time, is one of the most practical and perspective-shifting reads I've come across in a long time.
If you've ever ended a weekend convinced you had no time to yourself, this conversation will change how you see the week ahead.
Laura and I discuss:
Why tracking your time for a single week raises time satisfaction scores by nearly 18%, and what's actually driving that shift
The gap between how people think they spend their time and how they actually do, particularly for those who work flexibly or check email on weekends
The concept of "golden hours" and why the four to five hours between dinner and bedtime are far more valuable than most of us treat them
How to tell the difference between a complex life and a chaotic one, and the circus metaphor that reframes what a well-run household actually looks like
The weekly planning ritual Laura swears by, including the three rings of the circus she reviews every Thursday morning
Three surprisingly small changes that can make your workday feel genuinely better, without changing jobs
Key quotes
"Four to five hours is a lot of time to just write off as unusable. The day is not over after dinner."
"Complexity and chaos are not the same thing. We're aiming for controlled complexity."
Connect with Laura Vanderkam on Instagram placeholder], X (Twitter), and LinkedIn and her website, and check out her latest book Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance wherever you get good books.

And if this episode resonated, I recommend my conversation with Oliver Burkeman on how to make time for the things that actually count. Check that out here.

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M
Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at [email protected]
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You've bought the licenses. You've made the announcement. And a few months later, you're staring at a workforce either ignoring the tools entirely or churning out AI-generated fluff that nobody's reading. The ROI? Nowhere to be found.
The problem isn't AI. It's how organisations are rolling it out.
In this How I AI episode, Neo and I share a recording from a live webinar we ran on why AI rollouts fail and what it actually takes to set yours up for success. We cover the most common mistakes we're seeing on the ground, the research that should change how you think about training, and the question every leadership team needs to answer before spending another dollar on licenses.
Neo and I cover:
Why an unclear AI strategy at the leadership level creates confusion across teams, with some departments using the tools freely and others too uncertain to try.
The leadership credibility problem: when CEOs and senior leaders don't use AI themselves, the rest of the organisation takes it as a signal that they shouldn't either.
Why buying licenses without training can actually reduce productivity, producing a flood of low-quality, AI-generated work that slows people down rather than speeding them up.
The surprising finding from HBR research that the average time saving from AI is just 2.5%, and why vanity metrics like daily logins and token usage tell you almost nothing about real value.
The agent proliferation trap: why having everyone in your organisation building agents independently leads to duplicated, inconsistent, and unowned tools that create more confusion than clarity.
The cultural barrier of AI fear, and why people won't genuinely adopt a tool they believe is there to replace them.
AI brain fry, a distinct form of cognitive fatigue caused by constant context-switching and vigilance when managing multiple AI tasks simultaneously.
Why training to tasks rather than features is what actually shifts behaviour, and the research-backed minimum dose of five hours of hands-on training required to see any meaningful benefit.
The case for training close to license rollout to prevent bad habits forming before people know how to use the tools well.
A three-stage framework for AI adoption: access, literacy, and leverage (individual then organisational), with literacy positioned as an ongoing capability rather than a one-off event.
Why planning where time savings will actually go matters as much as achieving them, otherwise people simply fill the space with more work.
Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.
My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M
Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at [email protected]
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What if the thing you spend the most time on at work won't matter at all when you're gone?
It's a confronting question, but it's the kind Tom Rath lives with deliberately. He walks past a 10,000-headstone cemetery near his home in Washington DC and has never once seen a grave mention social media followers, email response times, or job titles. Yet these are the things most of us spend our days chasing.
In this episode, I sit down with Tom Rath, one of the most widely read authors in the world of work and wellbeing and the man behind StrengthsFinder 2.0, How Full Is Your Bucket?, and his just-released book What's the Point? Tom challenges the "follow your passion" narrative head-on and makes the case that purpose isn't a grand discovery waiting for you someday. It's what you do for other people, hour by hour, throughout the day.
We get into the single question Tom uses every morning to reprioritise his time, how to escape the comparison trap that platforms like LinkedIn are designed to pull you into, and why he believes the so-called initiators are the ones who will thrive in the age of AI.
Tom and I discuss:
Why "follow your passion" is misguided advice, and what Tom recommends doing instead when thinking about work and career
The statistics on how much of our career path we unconsciously inherit from our parents, and what to do about it
How strengths only really come to life when they're turned outward in service of another person
Tom's "what's the point?" question and how to use it daily to reprioritise your time and cut through distraction
Why resume virtues and eulogy virtues are so different, and how walking through cemeteries has sharpened Tom's thinking on what matters
Social comparison as the single biggest tax on your sense of progress at work, and how to reduce its grip
What a "shoulder hunter" is and how to find people whose thinking you can build on
Why initiators will have a significant advantage over responders as AI continues to reshape the workforce

Key quotes:
"Passion is inherently more self-serving, where purpose is by definition anchored in what it does for other people."
"Stop sleepwalking through your days and lives. The people who are continuing to do that day after day are in for a very rude awakening."
Connect with Tom Rath on Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn, visit his website at https://tomrath.org/, and check out his latest book What's the Point?.

If you enjoyed this episode, I'd recommend going back and listening to my chat with educator and parenting expert Lael Stone, who talks about the power of understanding our imprints — the stories we tell ourselves that we learned in childhood — and how they shape how we show up in the world, and importantly, what we can do to rewrite them. Check out part 1 and part 2.

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M
Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at [email protected]
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sign up for Inventium’s AI Agent Bootcamp virtual or in-person.
Your organisation hit its AI adoption target. Eighty percent of staff have a licence, onboarding is done, and the usage dashboard looks great. So why does the work feel the same, or worse? Hitting an adoption target and actually getting value from AI are two completely different things, and most organisations are confusing one for the other.
The truth is that a team using AI badly can actually perform worse than one not using it at all. Buried in mediocre output, drowning in documents nobody reads, and no closer to a better result for their customers.
In this How I AI episode, Neo and I dig into what actually separates high-performing AI-augmented teams from the average ones, and why so many organisations are measuring the wrong things.
Neo and I cover:
Why adoption metrics are almost always vanity metrics, and what to measure instead.
The difference between AI literacy and AI leverage, and why teams need both but rarely get past the first.
How poor AI training can actually make teams less productive.
Why slotting AI into an existing process is only ever an interim step, and what it looks like to genuinely re-engineer workflows.
The role of AI champions within functional teams, and why workflow architecture is a distinct and critical skill most people do not yet have.
Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/
Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at [email protected]
Credits: Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.